Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Amnesty International: A Template for Futility

Even in the worst period of the repression during the apartheid era in South Africa, the armed forces never bombed the townships
— Ronnie Kasrils, March 2009
BY PAUL DE ROOIJ • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 3, 2023

One would hope that human rights NGOs would be influential, be tools to mobilise the public against oppression and barbarity, and maybe be of use in making the perpetrators of crimes accountable… Or is it the case that human rights NGOs are instruments of propaganda, means to deflect action against state power, and even instrumental in justifying state violence and war? Maybe Amnesty International’s latest press releases and the inevitable “reports” will enable one to determine on which side of the ledger its actions fall.

Yet again the Palestinians face massive Israeli attacks against Gaza, and the retail bombing of the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and even Egypt. Israelis engage in these attacks every four or five years; they call them “mowing the lawn operations”. Inevitably, the human rights NGOs utter clucking sounds, and issue press releases and reports; some of their insufferable researchers will appear on TV mouthing predictable trite statements. And if past experience is any guide, all that effort will be an exercise in futility. Who reads these materials, have they ever led to any action or change of state policy, or have they galvanised a public into action? The answer is self-evident.

Amnesty’s output also suggests that they are a lazy bunch incapable of improving their “product” to make it more effective. Invariably they utilise the same template; they just fill in the blanks whenever the level of violence has propelled a “conflict” onto the front pages or to the top of the hour news reporting. The template requires distressing clucking sounds about the violence, and a tally of those killed; it provides a few individual examples of violations. It then blames “both sides,” and asserts that the Palestinian violence was “horrific” and “indiscriminate”; both sides have perpetrated war crimes. It then urges both sides to cease and desist; return to the status quo ante. And finally, it calls on the “international community” to impose an arms embargo on “both sides”. And “independent” investigators should be allowed in to compile evidence of war crimes. That is it.

Basic Background

Gaza has been under military occupation and control for decades, and extreme Israeli violence has punctuated its history. Massacres, bombings, assassinations have been regular features; each military attack is increasingly more destructive and violent than the preceding ones. Furthermore, since 2006 Gaza was transformed into the largest open air prison with Israeli forces controlling who enters/exits the exclave; walls, razor wire fences, and watch towers armed with robotic machine guns surround the area; drones buzz overhead every day, especially at night. Dov Weissglas, a close confidant of Ariel Sharon, quipped that they’d put Gaza “on a diet”. Israelis calculated the basic caloric intake required to maintain the population just above starvation, and proceeded to limit food imports to that level; airplanes sprayed herbicides on crops, and even small allotments. The water supplied into Gaza was polluted with high levels of salt and over-fluoridation. Unemployment rate in Gaza has been staggeringly high. Gazans have lived in a terrible situation for many years. Non-violent resistance was brutally crushed. With no prospects political or negotiated solution what were Palestinians supposed to do?

It is this history that must serve as the foundation to guide solidarity with the Palestinians, and for any organisation to channel efforts to ameliorate the situation. It behooves us to understand why human rights NGOs are a failure by design; to understand why the human rights babble is equally a cruel fraud. Here is an explanation of this failure in Eight Acts:

They are so ahistorical…

Given the above snapshot history, the nature of the crimes requires recognising them as crimes against humanity, arguably one of the most serious crimes under international law. Second, Israeli crimes put the violence of the Palestinian resistance into perspective. Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. Third, the long history of violence perpetrated against the Palestinians, and the resulting power imbalance, suggest that one should be in solidarity with the victim.

Amnesty however refuses to acknowledge the serious nature of Israeli crimes, by using an intellectually bankrupt subterfuge; it insists that as a rights-based organisation it cannot refer to historical context; doing so would be considered “political” in its warped jargon. An examination of what AI considers “background” in its press releases/reports confirms that there is virtually no reference to relevant history, e.g., the prior attacks on Gaza, who initiated those attacks, the Goldstone report, etc. Presto! Now there is no need to mention serious crimes. Every time AI issues the same statements and even some reports; they are written from the same template. They may change a few details, but each of their statements and reports studiously ignores the previous attacks as if history didn’t matter. It also doesn’t recognise the nature of the Palestinian resistance, and their right to self-defence. Nowhere does AI acknowledge that Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves. And finally, AI cannot express solidarity with the victim; hey, “both sides” are victims!

Criminalising Palestinian Resistance

When Palestinians were engaged in non-violent demonstrations in front of the walls / fences surrounding Gaza, AI didn’t have much to say about the demonstrators who were shot by snipers. A demonstrator in a wheelchair shot and killed; dozens of demonstrators shot in the knee, kids flying kites shot, a journalist operating a drone killed… There are many Palestinian prisoners arbitrarily imprisoned, and when some of them engage in months-long hunger strikes, even resulting in death, AI barely utters a peep. So, non-violent resistance didn’t deliver much, and thus armed resistance seemed to be the only option.

When the Palestinians launch crude inaccurate missiles this is deemed “indiscriminate” in nature and ipso facto a war crime. AI also deems the taking of hostages to exchange for Palestinian prisoners to be a war crime. Attacking Israel and in the process killing civilians is also deemed beyond the pale. So Amnesty’s gang is not willing to state anything constructive about the Palestinian resistance other than to chastise them with accusations of serious crimes.

A blatant double standard is at play. Palestinian weapons are rudimentary and are not precise, and AI labels these as “indiscriminate” thus unlawful. On the other hand, Israeli weapons that are very accurate used to deliberately target civilians, hospitals, mosques, bakeries, ambulances, etc. These weapons are fine and dandy; AI will merely state that an independent body might have to “investigate war crimes” — knowing full well the fraudulent nature of these so-called independent investigations. What is worse: using inaccurate weapons that may result in civilian deaths, or use very accurate weapons to intentionally kill civilians? And what about the scale and proportionality of the weapons? Most Palestinian weapons are small, and not very lethal. Israelis use huge bombs to flatten buildings, hospitals, … with inevitable civilian deaths. For every Palestinian rocket, how many Israeli bombs have dropped? Amnesty usually reports the former, but not the latter.

When resistance fighters take hostages (both civilian and military) AI deems this to be a war crime. On the other hand, when Israeli forces routinely round up Palestinian civilians and arbitrarily imprisons them, this merits no comment. The use of an Israeli military kangaroo court to rubber stamp the imprisonment order is enough to keep Amnesty at bay. Recent video footage shows that Palestinian resistance fighters were captured alive, but a few minutes later they were executed. Does this merit any AI reproach? AI has a pompous sounding “Evidence Investigation Unit” — they may be taking a little nap now.

Addressing Apartheid

In its 26 October 2023 press release AI states: “The root causes of the conflict to be addressed, including through dismantling Israel’s system of apartheid against all Palestinians.” Maybe uttering this statement about 40 or 50 years ago would have been a bold statement. But as Ronnie Kasrils, the great anti-apartheid fighter, stressed: the Palestinians face a system of oppression far more serious, pernicious and violent than what was experienced in South Africa during the 1960-70s. The current Israeli policy is meant to drive the Palestinians off their land (ethnic cleansing) and it doesn’t shy away from implementing a genocidal plan. Amnesty lags behind these developments.

Appeals to the international community

In the 26 October press release, AI also states: “The international community to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on all parties to the conflict given that serious violations amounting to crimes under international law are being committed.” The day after the 7 October attack, the US and UK started flying in military materiel — by now amounting to about 60 military cargo plane deliveries. The US is itself militarily involved having assembled an armada in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf; it has sent senior military officers to advice on the attack on Gaza; and a US Seal team is on location. Thus AI’s statement is yet another example of its futility and impotence; maybe it was meant to add a bit of comic relief.

But this time it is different…

While in the past, Amnesty could engage in its ritual press releases and reports, and eventually revert to its regular routine, the current attack on Gaza may force Amnesty to adopt a different stance or risk exposure of its true spineless and duplicitous nature.

Top Israeli politicians and military officers have ordered cutting off Gaza’s access to food, water, and fuel; outright state that all inhabitants “are not innocent,” are “human animals,” that “there is no safe place in Gaza,” “There is no symmetry; the children in the Gaza Strip brought this on themselves,”or recite Deuteronomy 25:19 to smite the Amalek. Other religious figures have chimed in with other vengeful and chilling religious utterances. The same chapter in Deuteronomy urges Israelis to prise open the jaws of the Amalek and pour molten lead into their throats. (NB: this gave rise to the 2008 operation name “Cast Lead”.) Arnon Soffer, the infamous demographer, stated (2004): “we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” And finally, a bevy of foreign prime minsters/presidents has flown in to repeat that: “Israel has a right to defend itself”. None of these dignitaries uttered a word urging restraint or a return to negotiations, let alone observance of international humanitarian law. Israel was given a green light to do whatever it wants with no impediments, and as a matter of fact, with the aid of recently flown-in military materiel. The UN will be rendered impotent given the US veto; and the lame ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel, thus any meaningful war crimes tribunal will never materialise.

So will Amnesty pursue its business as usual or opt for a stronger stance — preferably a pronouncement by a coalition of NGOs and solidarity activists. There will be an answer within a month.

The feces smellers

Agnes Callamard, AI’s Secretary General, is possibly one of the better and most outspoken general secretaries; there is no doubt that she is a well intentioned person. Many of her statements are clear and strong statements, but they are clearly limited by AI’s overall posture. But her stance is very much like that of a person who finds a fresh piece of feces in her path. After studying the sample, tasting it, and sniffing it, declares “that an independent investigation is necessary to determine if Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.” So why does AI hesitate to make a strong statement about Israel? It has to do with its funding; a strong stand would upset the main donors.

The nature of human rights organisations

Many little NGOs have popped up that are merely meant to assuage the liberal conscience. Thus one may be worried that bananas were produced under harmful and exploitative conditions, and thus a little sticker on the banana may warm the liberal soul. The sticker they offer is merely meant to reduce consumer hesitancy when buying a product. The human rights NGOs perform very much the same function. When sordid and violent acts occur somewhere in the world, well intentioned concerned individuals may want to do something about it. And what could be easier than sending a donation to a human rights NGO! You will even get an Amnesty sticker to paste on your forehead to boast your liberal righteousness. Furthermore, the NGO will enlist well intentioned people to perform next to useless tasks like writing overly polite letters to dubious politicians seeking to improve the prison conditions of their adopted “prisoner of conscience”. Resources and effort are deflected away from pressuring domestic politicians to stop aiding and abetting mass crimes. There seems to be no downside to the back slapping politicians visiting Netanyahu encouraging greater mass crimes. Where are the activists clamouring to stop weapons deliveries to Israel from the US, UK and Germany?

And of course, Israel views the human rights NGOs as a necessary nuisance — easily ignored. While volunteers write overly polite letters, the paper shredders in Israel are whirring away. There is no effective action sought by the human rights NGOs which would cause Israel to take notice. In the very least, the human rights NGOs could heed Palestinian civil society’s call to implement a boycott of Israel. The boycott campaign was effective against apartheid South Africa, and given that the Palestinians face conditions that are orders of magnitude worse than apartheid, it would suggest a boycott campaign would be in order. Amnesty claims to have seven million followers, thus a call to implement a boycott would have more effect than the empty exhortations to governments to do nothing.

In the end, one cannot expect an organisation to change its spots after such a long and dubious history which includes trumpeting for war (AI was instrumental in pushing the throwing-babies-out-of-incubators hoax), pushing state propaganda (e.g., putting Croatian propagandists on tour in the US to push the “rape camp” slur), and many more. Amnesty International was created by a Zionist, it is difficult to countenance that a critique of Israel would be tolerated even today. Amnesty International Israel was run for many years by Israeli Foreign Ministry officers; this gang blocked critical reporting and played the gate keeper function. Amnesty never responded to the revelation of the penetration of its Israeli branch. Even today, as Amnesty’s website shows, the Israeli branch of the organisation is based in Tel Aviv. Maybe a clarification about its contribution and about its personnel may be in order. AI must be aware that several prominent Palestinians refuse to meet with them. And if the Israeli branch contributes to or edits its reportage, then AI must confront the ethics of producing Palestinian human rights coverage by Israeli personnel. During the war in Yugoslavia, Serbian researchers were not allowed to report on the condition of Croatians, Bosnians; the evident bias was not tolerated. But when it comes to Palestinian issues, a different standard applies.

During the 1970s Dr. Israel Shahak, the well known scientist and activist, headed a human rights organisation which translated Hebrew texts into English. He related how the state attempted to harass and interfere with his organisation. Break-ins, intimidation, destruction of archives, and planting their own operatives in the organisation leading to successful violent takeover of the organisation. So, does Amnesty-Israel have the same fraught relationship with the state? Or are they on chummy terms with Israeli officials? If the latter, there may be a reason for that.

And then there is snake oil

Pushing for the observance of human rights doesn’t necessarily imply that one will obtain justice. The human rights agenda merely softens the edges of the status quo. As Amnesty’s position on the Israeli attacks on Gaza illustrate, pushing human rights can actually be incompatible with obtaining justice. Human rights are a bastardised, neutered, and debased form of justice. The application and effectiveness of international law is bad enough, but a pick and choose legal framework with no enforcement is even worse. If one seeks justice, then it is best to avoid the human rights discourse; above all, it is best to avoid human rights organisations. If one wants justice it is best to avoid the discourse that only delivers bandages.

Palestinians should be wary of sanctimonious do-gooders peddling human rights snake oil. In exchange for giving up their resistance and complying with AI’s norms, it is not likely that Palestinians will obtain a pixel of justice. One should be wary of human rights groups that don’t push for justice, play the role of Israel’s lawyer, and are bereft of solidarity with the victims. During the Algerian war for independence, Frantz Fanon related that whenever a European would come to talk with him about “human rights,” his urge was to fetch a gun. Palestinians could learn something from this. When the likes of Amnesty come wagging their finger, it is best to keep the old blunderbuss near at hand.

November 3, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia, Israel, and the Law of War Regarding Civilians

By Scott Ritter – Sputnik – 03.11.2023

There has been much discussion in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israeli military bases and settlements in the vicinity of Gaza related to issues of legitimate self-defense and the legality surrounding Israel’s use of force in response to that attack.

Inevitably, this discussion leads to an effort to compare Russia’s conduct in the Special Military Operation with Israel’s behavior to date regarding Gaza. The particular example of Mariupol is often raised as a point of comparison with the ongoing Israeli operation in Gaza. While it is far too soon to be able to make such a direct comparison of those two battles, one can examine the foundation of international law relied upon by both Russia and Israel in justifying their respective military operations. Sadly, Israel is found wanting.

Russia has cited the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter, as justification for the initiation of its military operation.

Article 51 reads as follows:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

In his address announcing the initiation of the special operation, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out a case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.

NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared, “did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”

Russia’s President set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self-defense as it applies to Article 51, citing the ongoing, imminent threat to the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass from a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.

For its part, Israel has repeatedly cited its inherent right to self-defense when justifying its ongoing military operations in Gaza. But Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has rejected that claim, declaring that, “as an occupying power, it [Israel] does not have that power.”

Nebenzia’s argument is founded in a 2004 advisory opinion written by the International Court of Justice. “Article 51 of the Charter,” the court wrote, “thus recognizes the existence of an inherent right of self-defense in the case of armed attack by one State against another State. However, Israel does not claim that the attacks against it are imputable to a foreign State.”

The ICJ did not say that “Israel has to face numerous indiscriminate and deadly acts of violence against its civilian population,” adding that Israel “has the right, and indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the life of its citizens.” However, the ICJ found, any measures taken by Israel must be “in conformity with applicable international law” As such, in so far as Gaza and much of the land that currently constitutes the territory of Israel can be considered “occupied territory” under international law, and noting that the threat Israel is responding to originates from within, and not outside, this occupied territory, Israel cannot invoke the right of self-defense based upon any claim of a “state of necessity” in order to preclude the wrongfulness of its occupation of Palestinian territory, under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

According to Nebenzia, Israel’s right to security “can be fully guaranteed only in the case of a just solution to the Palestinian problem on the basis of the well-known UN Security Council resolutions. We don’t deny Israel’s right to fight terror,” the Ambassador noted, “but fight terrorists and not civilians.”

Having established that Russia, in its conflict with Ukraine, has acted in conformity with international law by adhering to the requirements set forth under Article 51 of the UN Charter regarding self-defense, and that Israel is, due to its status as an occupying power operating in direct contravention of international law, not able to cite legitimate self-defense under Article 51 as a justification for its actions, the question now moves on to the question of whether or not either Russia or Israel executes their respective military missions in a manner which conforms to the standard set under international humanitarian law.

The key considerations that distinguish a legitimate act of war from a war crime is the concept of “military necessity.” Military necessity, by definition, “permits measures which are actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law. In the case of an armed conflict the only legitimate military purpose is to weaken the military capacity of the other parties to the conflict.”

The issue of “distinction” becomes paramount when discussing any question of “military necessity.” The notion of “distinction” ensures that parties to an armed conflict must “at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives, and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” The distinction prohibits “indiscriminate attacks and the use of indiscriminate means and methods of warfare,” such as carpet bombing, or an artillery bombardment which lacked a specific military purpose.

“Military necessity” and “distinction” serve as the core principles around which the international community has codified specific acts that constitute war crimes in the form of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in particular Article 8 (War Crimes). These include:

  • Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
  • Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
  • Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units, or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict; and
  • Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects.

Regarding their respective battles for Mariupol and Gaza, both Russia and Israel have been accused of engaging in activity that violates all of the acts described above. The main point that distinguishes Russia from Israel in this regard is that Russian doctrine specifically prohibits the behavior described. Israeli doctrine, both written and spoken, embraces it.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel Defense Force Northern Commander Gadi Eisenkot implemented a military strategy that sought to target and destroy entire civilian areas rather than engage in difficult and dangerous ground combat necessary to capture them. The goal of this strategy was more than simply trying to reduce Israeli casualties—the stated purpose of this new approach was to hold the entire civilian population accountable for the actions of Hezbollah fighters. Eisenkot did away with the requirement under international law to distinguish between military and civilian targets. This new doctrine was first used on the West Beirut Dahiya neighborhood, and the doctrine took its name from this location—the “Dahiya” Doctrine.

The “Dahiya Doctrine” specifically calls for the deliberate targeting of civilian populations and civilian infrastructure for the specific purpose of causing suffering and severe distress throughout the targeted population. The goal was to simultaneously destroy any enemy in the targeted area, to intimidate the targeted population into turning on the militants (in the case Hezbollah), and to deter other population centers from supporting Hezbollah. The “Dahiya Doctrine” was used extensively against Gaza since 2008, killing thousands of civilians. In its definition and through its execution, the “Dahiya Doctrine” amounts to nothing less than state terrorism, which means that the Israeli military, through its implementation of this policy, has become a state sponsor of terrorism.

As the facts emerge about the performance of the Russian military during the battle for Mariupol, it becomes crystal clear that the Russian soldiers behaved in an exemplary fashion, putting themselves at risk to ensure that the principles of distinction and military necessity were applied liberally and well within the spirit and letter of international law.

One cannot make a similar claim about the Israeli Defense Force and Gaza, where the “Dahiya Doctrine” is being executed with a vengeance.

November 3, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Shedding” of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1

It’s happening. The manufacturers and regulators knew it was a risk, yet, like numerous aspects of the Covid vaccine mRNA technology, did not test for excretion potential of spike proteins or LNP’s.

Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings | November 1, 2023

Awareness of the Federal Regulators and Vaccine Manufacturers

The data showing the toxicity and lethality of the vaccines started within weeks of the roll-out with hundreds of thousands of adverse events and hundreds of deaths reported to VAERS in January of 2021, far exceeding previous stopping points of any new medical product or vaccine.

Although ignored (to this day), anyone paying unbiased attention could see a further mountain of evidence develop, including a skyrocketing number of newspaper and television reports of healthy athletes and young people arresting and dying while doing normal everyday activities or sports (countered by corporate/government controlled media with a plethora of fact checking articles using cherry picked data to inform the world that what they are seeing is not factually true).

Then life insurance industry data emerged showing historically unprecedented rises in death claims being paid out amongst the healthiest sectors of society temporally associated with the proliferation of Covid mRNA vaccine mandates within schools, corporations, universities, health care institutions, federal contractors etc. Most telling of the deathly impact of mandates was the fact that the largest increases among the sudden, rapid rises in excess deaths occurred among employed white collar workers.

The reality is that these data are still ignored by media and public health agencies across the world. Even more worrying are the more recent reports finding universal contamination of every studied vaccine vial with large magnitude, excess levels of DNA fragments and DNA plasmids. Then the discovery that the DNA plasmids used in the manufacturing process contained genetic sequences that both promote DNA integration into the human genome as well as promote the development of cancer.

It truly is unimaginable that we now must consider the risks (and reality) of “shedding” of the vaccine products from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated. This now has implications for nearly every human being walking the earth, vaccinated or unvaccinated (including me).

This series will explore the regulatory, scientific, epidemiological, and clinical data indicating that shedding is occurring. The health of who knows how many is now being threatened, with the extent of the risks likely both highly variable and difficult to predict, both in the short term and long term. That is unless we start to seriously study the phenomenon further. So, let’s review what is known.

Within 3 months of the rollout of the global Covid mRNA vaccination campaign, I was consulted by two different unvaccinated women in their late 30’s and early 40’s respectively, who reported that they were suffering acute menstrual abnormalities in the days following close exposure to a recently vaccinated practitioner (one visited a massage therapist and another an acupuncturist). Both had a history of highly regular, uncomplicated menstrual cycles over decades.

Since that time, at least twenty other unvaccinated and vaccinated people, both men and women, have reported to me compelling histories of typical post-mRNA vaccine adverse effects subsequent to close exposure to vaccinated family members, contacts, or friends.

Further, my partner Scott Marsland at our Leading Edge Clinic, who also specializes in treating Long Covid/Long Vax syndromes, has a growing series of detailed case histories of similar “shedding” events occurring. I will revisit this in a later post in this series, but I will briefly say here that our clinical observations conclude that symptomatic shedding events do occur. However, we have little idea of exactly how common it is occurring among the general population.

This is further complicated by the fact that even if it were occurring frequently, the vast majority of people suddenly developing typical vaccine side effects symptoms after exposure to a vaccinated person would never think to relate it to exposure to shed vaccine products. It is my belief that very few people in the general public are aware of the possibility it could occur. You know, because the regulators have assured the country that mRNA technology is “safe and effective.”

However, my general sense is that it occurs largely in people who have increased physiologic sensitivity to environmental exposures, toxins, or pharmaceuticals and that it is generally transmitted by someone recently vaccinated or someone who is producing a lot of spike protein. Note that is my “general sense.” More studies are required to fully understand both the frequency of and physiologic impacts from such events.

My ignorance as to the frequency of symptomatic shedding events is due to the fact that the concept of transmitting spike proteins (or lipid nanoparticles) from a Covid mRNA vaccinated person to another is one of the least studied and published-on aspect of the mRNA vaccine technology.

What is so shocking about that lack of research (actually nothing is shocking anymore) is that shedding has major global implications. Apparently it is not just me who thinks this because, as an expert on several aspects of Covid, I have been lecturing across the U.S, Europe, and South America in conferences, Parliamentary hearings, or invited lectures. Questions about shedding appear everywhere (in the dozens of Q & A’s that I have participated in, it is nearly always the first question. It is also a very common topic in the chat of our FLCCC weekly webinar.

Know that in this tonight’s FLCCC webinar, I will present a 15-20 minute overview of this series along with my private practice partner Scott Marsland. We expect to be deluged with questions after.

Anyway, I believe that by the end of this series on the science, epidemiology, and clinical observations of shedding, you will be convinced that it can and does occur.

What IS The Definition Of Shedding In Regards To The Covid mRNA Vaccines?

From our Federal government, in this FDA document, the term “shedding” is defined as:

“The release of viral or bacterial gene therapy products from the patient by any or all of the following routes: feces (feces); secretions (urine, saliva, nasopharyngeal fluids, etc.); or through the skin (pustules, lesions, sores).”

They forgot to mention “exhaled breath.” More on that later. The “products” they refer to that can be transmitted from a Covid vaccinated person to another include not only the genetically programmed spike protein product, but also the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) containing the mRNA that is in the injections as well as naked mRNA that can be released from the LNP. Even more worrying is the recent shocking discovery that every single Moderna and Pfizer vaccine vial is contaminated with high levels of DNA plasmids potentially capable of integrating into the human genome. Contemplating that last one is disturbing, the implications of which we will not know for some time.

Why Would The Modified mRNA Vaccine Technology Lead To The Possibility of Shedding?

First off, let’s be clear that the Covid mRNA and DNA vaccines are gene therapy medicinal products (GMTPs or GTP’s) as stated in the FDA’s 2015 document on Gene Product Shedding Studies.

“Gene therapy products are all products that mediate their effects by transcription and/or translation of transferred genetic material and/or by integrating into the host genome and that are administered as nucleic acids, viruses, or genetically engineered microorganisms.

Also note that in this European Medicines Agency (EMA) document, the mRNA vaccines also meet their definition of gene therapy medicinal products (GMTP’s).

Ok, now that we know what a gene therapy product is and that the Covid mRNA injection is actually a form of gene therapy (marketed to the public as a “vaccine”), what does that have to do with “shedding?” Again from the FDA document regarding the evaluation of the safety of gene therapy products, they emphasize the importance of studying shedding:

Shedding is distinct from biodistribution because the latter describes how a product is spread within the patient’s body from the site of administration while the former describes how it is excreted or released from the patient’s body. Shedding raises the possibility of transmission of virus or bacteria based gene therapy products (VBGT) from treated to untreated individuals (e.g., close contacts and health care professionals).

This guidance represents FDA’s current thinking on how and when shedding data should be collected for VBGT and oncolytic products during preclinical and clinical development and how shedding data can be used to assess the potential for transmission to untreated individuals.

So, with these findings in mind, it may be no wonder why the FDA insists on shedding studies:

Further on in the document, the FDA again emphasizes the importance of shedding studies:

Note that the FDA emphasizes the importance of doing human shedding studies and not just relying on animal studies:

To inform the design of human shedding studies, shedding data may be collected in animals following administration of the VBGT or oncolytic product. These data can help estimate the likelihood and potential shedding profile in humans, particularly when there is concern about transmission to untreated individuals. However, such data cannot substitute for human shedding studies for several reasons.

But again, no studies testing whether excretion of mRNA-containing LNPs, modified spike-encoding mRNA, or spike produced by vaccinated people have been done. Well, I shouldn’t say none, because in this paper the author cites a Pfizer document obtained by FOIA which apparently revealed that shedding was studied in the urine and feces of intra-muscular injected rats. Unfortunately, that document is no longer at the website referenced.

To summarize from the above, the FDA’s position is that:

  • the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products
  • Gene therapy products require shedding studies in both animals and humans
  • Gene therapy product shedding raises the possibility of transmission from treated to untreated individuals

Note that much of the rest of this series of posts on shedding is guided by a masterful comprehensive review of the topic of gene therapy product shedding by independent researcher (by definition) Helene Banoun in Infectious Diseases Research. Hers is one of the only papers I could find that attempted to meticulously explore what is known about shedding of the mRNA gene therapy vaccines.

As already stated, an important point Banoun makes is:

There was no regulation of mRNA clinical trials prior to RNA vaccines, yet there is strict regulation of gene therapy products. It is difficult to justify that mRNA vaccines are not considered in the same way as gene therapies regarding this regulation; indeed the only difference is that they are (historically) supposed to protect against a disease and not cure it. Gene therapies are intended for a small number of people in poor health, whereas vaccines are used on a large scale on healthy people: it would therefore be wise to apply stricter rules to them.

She further points out another omission of the regulatory process:

Any experiment involving the deliberate transfer of a nucleic acid to a human must be preceded by Institutional Biosafety Committee approval (document on the regulatory standards is here), but approval was not given because of the emergency clearance given to mRNA vaccines.

Therefore, according to both the American and European agencies, mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products and should have been subjected to excretion studies of all secreted fluids (urine, exhaled droplets, saliva, sputum, nasopharyngeal fluids, semen, breast milk, feces, and sweat). Again, these studies were not done for mRNA vaccines nor for the DNA adenovirus vaccine (J&J).

So, where are the clinical human shedding studies? Well, I just learned of one that is about to be published (next ten days?) where the research team exposed a population of unvaccinated women to vaccinated individuals and their assessment outcome was the development of menstrual abnormalities. I know the results but want to respect the research teams right to present their original work. They have promised to share their manuscript with me and Paul Marik as soon as the peer-review and acceptance process is complete. I have no idea what journal they submitted to but I can be highly confident it is not the New England Journal of Medicine.

The entire reason why I did a “deep dive” into shedding science is because shedding was not studied when it absolutely should have been and I believe with near certainty that it occurs. Note my use of “near certain” is only to seem objective but it really is too late for that – both my partner Scott and I have diagnosed and successfully treated a number of shedding “victims.”

The lack of shedding studies prior to the mRNA rollout was, in my opinion, an insanely reckless and irresponsible omission (or willfully criminal, take your pick). As an evolving expert in the evaluation and treatment of Covid mRNA vaccine injury syndromes, I and others have identified the spike protein as the main component responsible for not only the pathogenicity of Covid but also of the vaccines, with this review paper proposing a new field named “spikeopathy” (study of the disease processes triggered by the spike protein).

If vaccine transcribed spike protein can be transmitted in sufficient quantity from vaccinated folks to unvaccinated ones, it stands to reason that adverse effects of the vaccine can develop in some unvaccinated people who came into contact (or close proximity) with vaccinated people. How did they get away with not studying this possibility?

An easy answer is they were doing science at “warp speed.” The more uncomfortable answer is that the “vaccines”, although meeting the definition of a gene therapy product, were actually not even legally considered a medical product at all and thus did not require a diverse range of safety studies (like on genotoxicity, reproductive risks, excretion potential etc). What? Why? How?

The reality is that the Covid vaccines, as a result of successive federal legislative actions which evolved over decades, was legally categorized as a “countermeasure” under a “public health emergency.” Such “countermeasures” require no specific regulatory approval process prior to dissemination. All a countermeasure needs is the recommendation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services that “it may be effective.”

This is the conclusion derived from the legal investigatory work of various independent and legal experts and researchers like Catherine Watts, Todd Callender, and Sasha Latypova. If interested in learning more, I would watch this lecture by Sasha Latypova (scroll down the page to find her lecture). As they have uncovered, “countermeasures” (even gene therapy ones) do not legally require studies of excretion potential, bio-distribution, pharmacokinetics, genotoxicity, insertional mutagenesis etc.

They don’t even require FDA regulated clinical trials of efficacy or safety.

So why did Pfizer and Moderna even do the efficacy trials? Latypova maintains that they did this not only to satisfy the public’s confidence to increase vaccine uptake, but also to “fool” the public into thinking these vaccines were medical products subject to standard (albeit accelerated) pharmaceutical product regulatory processes.

This obscured the reality that they were instead classified as military “countermeasures” against a perceived (if not actual) bioweapon. To wit, the COO of Operation Warp Speed was a General from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the vaccine manufacturers were under contract with the DOD to produce the countermeasure, sometimes referred to as a “demonstration (demo)” and/or a “prototype” in numerous legal documents they uncovered.

Anyway, as a result of this lack of a legal requirement to fully study these products in a public health emergency, the list and types of studies that should have been conducted (but were not) is long. Researchers and clinicians have been screaming about this since they were rolled out. These cries were met with a deafening silence by governmental health agencies across the world.

I know, it is a lot to take in.

But the latest “word on the street” is that the finance and insurance industries may finally be waking up to this fraud and its devastating impacts on U.S disability and death rates. Knowledge of these society-wide impacts largely results from the work of two different research teams led by former Blackrock portfolio manager Ed Dowd and insurance industry consultant Josh Stirling).

This article describes the reasons why Pfizer and Moderna stock are crashing of late. Put more succinctly, from what I hear it is due to the hedge fund guys shorting their stock. I believe Pfizer is in even deeper trouble now that this “forensic” paper just got published finding that they hid vaccine trial deaths which obscured a 3.7 fold increased risk of cardiac death in the vaccinated arm of their trial.

“Shedding” Part 1– Shedding of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1

Shedding” Part 2 – The Bio-Distribution and Excretion Potential of Covid mRNA Vaccine Products

Shedding” Part 3 – Can You Absorb Lipid Nanoparticles From Being Exposed To a Vaccinated Person?

Shedding” Part 4 – Evidence of Placental and Breast Milk Transmission of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components

“Shedding” Part 5 – Evidence of Shedding Causing Illness In Others

“Shedding Part 6 Clinical Case Notes Describing Shedding Phenomena Among Leading Edge Clinic Patients

“Shedding” Part 7 – Shedding Via Sexual Intercourse – Clinical Reports

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Mark Groeneveld, 20, Becomes Fifth Dutch Cyclist to Die or Suffer Serious Heart Problems This Year

BY ROBERT KOGON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 31, 2023

In the early hours of Monday, October 23rd, the 20-year-old Dutch cyclist Mark Groeneveld passed away, apparently of a heart attack, after having dropped out of a race in Hong Kong earlier in the day. Several reports (here, for instance, in Dutch) claim that he dropped out of the race for mechanical reasons and that his subsequent collapse was “unrelated”.

In a statement on Facebook, his team X-Speed United writes: “While the circumstances of Mark’s passing are currently under investigation, we have received preliminary information that suggests it may have been due to a heart attack.”

This would make Groeneveld the fifth Dutch or Flemish cyclist to be stricken by serious heart problems this year. Groeneveld’s death comes just one month after the Flemish cyclist Nathan Van Hooydonck got into a car crash after suffering what the Belgian paper De Morgen has described as “cardiac arrest” while driving. The incident happened on September 12th, just two days after the conclusion of the Tour of Great Britain, in which Van Hooydonck helped his teammate Wout van Aert of Team Jumbo Vista to victory.

Van Hooydonck, who was 27 years old at the time of the incident, would have to be placed in an artificial coma. He would subsequently undergo surgery to have a defibrillator implanted. He has retired from professional racing.

Just two weeks before the Van Hooydonck incident, in the early hours of August 29th, the 32-year-old Dutch cyclist Wesley Kreder of the French Cofidis team suffered what he himself has described as “cardiac arrest” while sleeping. “I’m happy to be alive,” Kreder told the Dutch public broadcaster NOS. Kreder has also announced his retirement from competitive racing.

Two other professional cyclists, the 35-year-old Flemish cyclist Sep Vanmarcke and the 25-year-old Dutch cyclist Jarno Mobach, announced their retirements this summer after they were both discovered to have heart tissue scarring. Mobach is a former winner of the junior version of the prestigious Paris-Roubaix race. Vanmarcke announced his retirement in July and Mobach in late September, just a couple of days after Van Hooydonck’s announcement.

As previously reported on the Daily Sceptic here, Flemish cycling already had a serious scare in the summer of 2021, when three members of just one Flemish cycling team developed cardiac problems and would be diagnosed with myocarditis shortly after being vaccinated against COVID-19.

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

US Has ‘Proven Track Record’ of Making, Breaking Arms Control Deals to Gain Advantage

Sputnik – 02.11.2023

An expert told Sputnik that Washington was likely agreeing to arms control talks with China in order to project an image of reasonableness to the world, rather than to deescalate the potential for a nuclear conflict to break out.

The Chinese Foreign Minister has revealed that representatives from Beijing and Washington will meet next week to discuss nuclear arms control – a topic rarely discussed by the two nuclear superpowers.

The meeting comes weeks after a Pentagon report indicated China’s small nuclear weapons arsenal was growing at a rate faster than Washington experts had expected. The US lacks precise intelligence on China’s arsenal, with the October report estimating China has some 500 nuclear warheads and anticipating they will have 1,000 by 2030. However, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists nonprofit said in March that China has 410 nuclear warheads. By contrast, the US has more than 5,000 nuclear weapons.

Brian Berletic, a former US Marine and an independent geopolitical researcher and writer, told Sputnik that the US had likely agreed to the talks in order to appear like it is trying to reach an accommodation with China, against which it has been ramping up its military and political antagonisms in recent years.

“In the past, the US has made, then broken, arms control deals with other nations primarily to appear to be pursuing a diplomatic resolution to tensions with other nations, while in reality sabotaging the deals to then accuse their adversaries of posing a threat to global peace and stability,” he explained.

“We’ve seen the US do this repeatedly to Russia and now Iran. It appears they would like to pursue a similar formula with China. It’s unlikely China would allow the US to leverage such a deal to gain intelligence on Chinese nuclear capabilities.”

He noted that “if the US thought it was possible to constrain or reverse Chinese nuclear capabilities I think they would try, especially under the guise of an arms control treaty.”

“In the worst-case scenario, the United States would like to create a situation where it would have an overabundance of nuclear weapons to use against China in a first strike, having developed what it hopes are significant anti-missile capabilities and also hoping that whatever damage China does in retaliation would give it the advantage emerging from a nuclear exchange,” he said.

“While this calculus seems unthinkable to ordinary people, the US spent decades throughout the Cold War making such plans and continues encircling both Russia and China with nuclear weapons in an apparent continuation of this mindset.”

Berletic dismissed the notion of a trilateral treaty between the US, Russia, and China, as Washington has long said it hopes to obtain.

“The US has a proven track record of making, then breaking treaties, agreements, and policies of all kinds. The US is waging a proxy war against Russia at this moment because of its broken promises regarding the expansion of NATO and its undermining of the Minsk Agreements,” he noted.

“Tensions continue rising between the US and China specifically because of Washington’s violation of its own ‘One China’ policy. Until it can uphold these previous policies, it cannot be trusted to uphold these much more important arms-control agreements.”

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Neocon regime change in Gaza will complicate ‘two-state solution’

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 2, 2023 

The world-wide condemnation of Israel’s horrific violation of international humanitarian law is not deterring its military operations in Gaza. In remarks on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the calls for ceasefire, saying these “are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas. That will not happen.” And he sought moral and spiritual support from the Bible for his war. 

At least two armoured and infantry divisions of about 20,000 soldiers have reportedly entered the Palestinian enclave. The New York Times reported, quoting Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defence, that US special forces, including commandos, have also been deployed to Israel. The report disclosed that several other Western nations have also quietly moved teams of special forces closer to Israel. 

Maier said without elaborating, “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things.” As he put it, the situation in Gaza “is going to be a very complex fight going forward.”  

On the other hand, there are growing domestic worries that the US could get entangled in another costly conflict in the Middle East. Braving threats of physical assault and vilification by conservative media, 55 members of Congress have appealed to Biden and Blinken that Israel’s military operation should “take into account” international law. But the administration refuses to take much notice of such demands.  

What emerges is a grim picture of President Biden giving a free hand to Netanyahu on how he chooses to seek retribution. In exceptionally sharp remarks, the Washington Democrat in the House Pramila Jayapal said on Sunday that the US is “losing credibility” on the global stage due to its “double standard” in its level of support for Palestinians compared to Ukraine, and as a result, the US is “being isolated in the rest of the world.” Jayapal flagged, “There are racists within the Netanyahu government.” This must be the first time that such pointed criticism of Israel is voiced by politicians in America.

Indeed, the Biden administration’s doublespeak scatters the strategic ambiguity that shrouded its stance so far. What stands out is a bizarre neocon project to force regime change in Gaza through coercion and install a pliant regime, midway to a “two-state solution”. 

Mahmoud Abbas, a tragic figure but a fixture still of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a complicated multi-decade relationship with America and Israel (and his own people) appears to be at the centre of the proposed transition. At any rate, all roads lead to Ramallah 

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading for Israel on Friday on yet another regional tour. Significantly, during a testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, he publicly declared the Biden Administration’s project for the Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip from where it was ousted by Hamas in 2007, a year after the resistance group won the legislative elections. 

As Blinken put it, “At some point, what would make the most sense would be for an effective and revitalised Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza. 

“Whether you can get there in one step is a big question that we have to look at. And if you can’t, then there are other temporary arrangements that may involve a number of other countries in the region. It may involve international agencies that would help provide for both security and governance.”  

It appears that Abbas at 87 may be a transitional figure. But CIA and Mossad have longstanding contacts within Fatah.

Suffice to say, the regime change in Gaza Strip is at the core of the neocon vision of “two-state solution”, which Biden keeps talking about. Only, the US’ “two-state solution” and what the global majority understands it to be are two different things — like chalk and cheese. 

Evidently, the US estimates that the unprecedented Arab unity is not going to translate as decisive action on the ground. Secondly, from Blinken’s words, the US intends to control and dominate the two-state solution (regime change in Gaza) per its blueprint. 

To be sure, the Iran factor is going to be crucial. The US seems to be betting that so long as Israel does not invade Lebanon or go for the jugular veins of Hezbollah, Iran will not intervene. Now, that is a big gambit — the “known unknown” — as it underestimates Iran’s commitment to the Palestinian problem.

In Tehran’s assessment, Israel suffered a massive blow from Hamas from which it will not recover — that is to say, Israel is a weakened regional power going forward. Thus, an inflection point is reached, as the US’ capacity and influence is also diminishing.

Iran’s Foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Doha and Ankara on Wednesday. While in Doha, he met with the head of the Hamas politburo, Ismail Haniyeh, for the second time last month. Later, while addressing a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara, Amir-Abdollahian warned that “If the genocide and war crimes against civilians are not stopped, the region is very close to making a big and decisive decision… (and) the consequences will be severe, and the warmongers will definitely not be able to bear the consequences.” 

Meanwhile, the Russian position on the Gaza situation also has hardened. In a powerful speech at a meeting on Monday with members of the Security Council and Government and the heads of security agencies, President Vladimir Putin called out the US and its satellites as “the main beneficiaries of global instability … (who) are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine… channelling financial resources, including to Ukraine and the Middle East, and fuelling hatred in Ukraine and the Middle East.” 

Notably, Putin compared the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as two sides of the same coin — manifestations of the US’ desperate attempt to shore up its diminishing global influence in a multipolar world. Putin alleged that western intelligence instigated through social media the rioting in Makhachkala (Dagestan) on Sunday night in an attempt to provoke “pogroms in Russia”. Putin said the US and its satellites hatched the plot to discredit Russia.

Importantly, he drew the conclusion that “They (US) do not want Russia to participate in solving any international or regional problems, including in the Middle East.”

Where the Biden administration’s “two-state solution” is deeply flawed will be on four counts. First, the entire project is anchored on an absolute military victory over Hamas. It reminds one of the triumphalist cry of “Mission Accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the deceptively easy ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan previously. (By the way, Biden was an ardent supporter of Iraq invasion and had voted to launch the war in Afghanistan in the first place, three days after the 9/11 attacks.)

Second, there is a human content here. Palestinians detest the US and Israel and will not submit to quislings handpicked by these countries. Both Fatah and Abbas are thoroughly discredited entities. At any rate, what makes the Biden Administration so very confident that the Arab regimes will be willing to act as Washignton’s surrogates or fifth column in Gaza? It is a rude and insulting assumption, to say the least.

Third, Hamas’ grassroots support cannot be wished away. Resistance movements may have their ups and downs but seldom die so long as conditions of foreign hegemony exist.

Finally, Washington would still need UN Security Council mandate to legitimise whatever plot it is hatching, which is difficult to extract on American terms if Putin’s speech on Monday is anything to go by. Putin used exceptionally harsh language to describe the carnage unleashed in Gaza.

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Gaza: Where is Hezbollah?

lecridespeuples | Resistance News | November 2, 2023

Following the spectacular “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation launched by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, the army of occupation has inflicted an unprecedented level of massacre and destruction on its defenseless civilian population, trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp. While Israel’s official stated aim is the annihilation of the Palestinian resistance, its unofficial objective seems to be the ethnic cleansing of the entire Gaza Strip, where everything is being done to make life impossible, paving the way for the definitive liquidation of the Palestinian cause.

Since the beginning of this crucial phase in the Arab-Israeli struggle, where the stakes seem existential on both sides, all eyes have been turned towards the northern border of occupied Palestine, with concern, hope and/or frustration: while NATO provides Israel with all its political and military support, will the Lebanese Hezbollah, which has always vowed to stand firmly by the Palestinians and fight the occupier relentlessly until the total Liberation of Palestine, intervene at the hour of truth?

Why are all eyes on Hezbollah?

“France is ready for the international coalition against ISIS, to which we are committed for our operation in Iraq and Syria, to also fight against Hamas. […] We must also conduct this fight in such a way as to avoid setting the whole region ablaze. I warn Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, the Houthis in Yemen and all the factions in the region that threaten Israel not to take the ill-considered risk of opening up new fronts. To do so would be to open the door to a regional conflagration from which everyone would lose. This is a necessity for all the peoples of the region: let’s do everything we can to avoid adding tears to tears and blood to blood.“

These were the words spoken by French President Emmanuel Macron in Tel Aviv on October 24, 2023, at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, whom he had come to assure of his unconditional support, going so far as to make the ignoble and grotesque proposal of involving French and NATO armed forces in the fight against Palestinian resistance. If he was the first (and only) to suggest this idea, he was not the first to threaten the Lebanese Hezbollah not to open a new front against Israel. The arrival of a large American war fleet in the Mediterranean has been widely interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the entire “Resistance Axis” in general (an informal alliance comprising, in addition to Palestinian Resistance factions, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen) and Hezbollah in particular. When he announced the deployment of aircraft carriers in a speech on October 10, US President Joe Biden made it clear what he was talking about:

The United States has also enhanced our military force posture in the region to strengthen our deterrence. The Department of Defense has moved the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the Eastern Mediterranean and bolstered our fighter aircraft presence. And we stand ready to move in additional assets as needed.

Let me say again — to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t. Our hearts may be broken, but our resolve is clear.

Yesterday, I also spoke with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK to discuss the latest developments with our European allies and coordinate our united response.

This macabre ballet of Western leaders renewing their unconditional allegiance and support to the State of Israel clearly indicates, in addition to their abject and irreversible moral decay, the seriousness of the threat hanging over the occupier, and underlines Israel’s fragility far more than its strength: if Hamas, the weakest link in the Resistance Axis, can break all the defensive lines around Gaza in the space of a few hours, shattering forever any illusions about the superiority of the Israeli army, the devastating consequences of a regional war against Israel suddenly appeared in people’s minds more forcefully than ever. Israel would face total annihilation. Hezbollah alone, with more than 100,000 men and an even greater number of rockets and precision missiles, would be capable of inflicting casualties on Israel considerably greater than those of October 7, seizing and holding to vast territories in occupied northern Palestine and destroying the country’s vital infrastructure. And what if States like Syria and Iran intervened? The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, was in no way exaggerating when he declared that, by visiting Israel, Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron and others had come to the bedside of a dying friend:

The evil powers in the world can see that the Zionist regime is falling apart and on the verge of destruction due to the very strong, decisive blow of the Palestinian fighters. Thus, by making these trips, by expressing solidarity with the Zionist regime and providing it with criminal tools such as bombs and other weaponry, they are struggling to keep the wounded, crippled entity on its feet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was even more explicit about the presence of US naval air forces off the coast of Israel, saying that they were specifically directed against Hezbollah:

“I do not understand why the United States is sending aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean. It has sent one group and has announced the intention of sending another one. I do not see any sense in it. What are they planning to bomb there? Lebanon? What are they planning to do there? Or are they doing this for intimidation? But there are people there who are no longer afraid of anything. The problem should not be addressed in this way. Instead, we should look for compromise solutions. This is what we should do. These actions are certainly whipping up tension. If the conflict spreads beyond the Palestinian territories, things will get out of control.”

Indeed, neither Hezbollah nor its allies are afraid, on the contrary: in fact, it’s fair to say that both in occupied Palestine and on the international scene, fear has changed sides. Moreover, if Joe Biden began by threatening Hezbollah and then the Axis of Resistance not to intervene in the conflict between Israel and Gaza, he quickly denied the allegation (spread by the Netanyahu government) that the United States would intervene alongside Israel if Hezbollah attacked (“It’s not true. I never said that”, Biden replied curtly), and his administration is now quietly advising Israel not to do anything that might bring Hezbollah into the picture.

Finally, let’s not forget that the Resistance Axis itself has issued the most explicit warnings to US forces: any open intervention alongside Israel will result in massive intervention by Palestine’s allies, with direct strikes not only against the Zionist entity (Yemen has already struck it four times with drones and missiles), but also against US forces in the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East. And these are not empty threats: US bases in Iraq and Syria have been struck daily by Resistance factions since October 8 (so far, 23 attacks were acknowledged by the US command, and only two “retaliations” from the occupying US forces have taken place, which clearly demonstrates who is emboldened and who is intimidated). It’s clear that it’s not just Gaza that’s on the offensive, but all the forces of the Resistance Axis, whose enthusiasm and morale are at an all-time high since the spectacular success of the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, which was certainly no surprise for Hezbollah and its allies.

How does Hezbollah view the situation?

Far from adopting the defeatist and catastrophist view prevalent in the West due to the pervasiveness of racism, imperialism and Hollywood mythology, promoted by the most formidable media propaganda machine in history and extolling the invincibility of White armies — be they those of NATO or Israel, largely assimilated to the dominant civilization— the Resistance Axis does not consider Gaza to be on the brink of annihilation, but on the threshold of its greatest victory. Gaza is not in a defensive position, but one of initiative and conquest. Gaza is not fighting for survival, but leading the greatest liberation battle in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the Palestinian Resistance has launched its most audacious attack to date at a time of its choosing, when its forces and those of its allies are at their peak, and those of the enemy are more fragile than ever.

The immediate objectives of the Resistance in Gaza are the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, an end to the desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque and to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and especially in East Jerusalem, and the lifting of the blockade. These three goals will most certainly be achieved, even if it takes several years. Experience showed this in 2006: whether it’s the capture of Gilad Shalit by Hamas in June 25 or the capture of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev by Hezbollah in July 12, Israel always starts out in a rage, launching campaigns of destruction in the hope of achieving military success or turning the civilian population against the Resistance, then realizes that none of these objectives can be achieved and that its army is heading for a debacle, and saves face by asking its US sponsor to stop vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council. The occupying power finally resolves to engage in negotiations and yields to the demands of the Resistance: Hezbollah freed all its prisoners in 2008, and Hamas freed over 1,000 in 2011. This is a recurring pattern, and there’s every chance of it happening again this time.

Admittedly, the destruction inflicted by Israel on Gaza, the scale of the massacres and the humanitarian stranglehold are unprecedented. But they are by no means a military achievement. The command, strength and capabilities of Hamas and the other Resistance factions in Gaza remain intact, as demonstrated by their ability to maintain rocket and missile fire against Israel on a daily basis, to prevent his groud invasion by daily attacks and to strike the Israeli territory more and more deeply. The 2006 war in Lebanon definitively proved that a simple air campaign, however violent, was incapable of liquidating, or even significantly weakening, a popular Resistance that has adopted guerrilla tactics. And the prospect of a ground offensive, whether in Lebanon or Gaza, has always remained wishful thinking on the Israeli side, as the fighters of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad only dream of this opportunity to inflict considerable losses on Israeli forces. Decades of low-cost occupation against civilians in the West Bank have rendered the IDF absolutely incapable of carrying out a real offensive against armed forces worthy of the name, and this prospect literally terrorizes all echelons of command, who even fear mass mutinies and desertion on the part of their soldiers, the most cowardly in the world. The proof is that for 25 days, Israel has been promising an imminent ground offensive, but has only made timid incursions on the edge of Gaza, in largely deserted areas, still suffering heavy losses that only strict military censorship and the black-out imposed on Gaza allows hiding for the moment: is such an army ready to confront an urban guerrilla, or will it be decimated? All the massacres of civilians only reflect the impotent rage of the occupying army and unmask its cowardice, barbarity and insatiable thirst for innocent blood. The atrocious images that are broadcast every day constitute an unfathomable disgrace and arouse the indignation of the entire world, which has clearly understood that the IDF is not an army of fighters, but of murderers of women and children. And the prestige of the Israeli army is not only shattered internationally, but in the eyes of the Israeli government, military command and population, which are more divided than ever.

Hezbollah, like the other forces of the Resistance Axis, is certainly not indifferent to the humanitarian aspect of the situation in Gaza, and will most certainly intervene in force if a red line is crossed. But the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon remains focused on the military aspect, in which, however difficult it may be to accept amid the daily scenes of carnage and plight of Gaza’s civilian population, the Palestinian Resistance holds the upper hand, just as the Lebanese Resistance never lost the upper hand throughout the 33 days of massacre and destruction in 2006. Destroying civilian infrastructure, massacring and starving populations and imposing a medieval siege on them, depriving more than two million people of water, electricity, fuel and medicine can only win a war against a weak political leadership, and a people incapable of enduring such suffering: but the Palestinians have long demonstrated that their resilience is, quite literally, unrivalled and foolproof. They would be slaughtered to the last man, woman, child and baby rather than give in to Israeli mass terrorism or become refugees for the third time, after the forced exoduses of 1948 (Nakba) and 1967 (Naksa), of which they are the direct descendants. But there is no doubt that if the Resistance in Gaza is seriously threatened in its integrity or even its existence, or if the entire Palestinian population is threatened with imminent forced displacement or humanitarian catastrophe, then Hezbollah and all the forces of the Resistance Axis will intervene with all their firepower, and this will be the end of the temporary usurping entity, even if the price to pay is enormous. If Hezbollah was ready for all-out war against Israel over Lebanon’s maritime borders, how could it hesitate when the Palestinian cause faced an existential threat? It is even possible that certain forces of the Resistance Axis have already taken the decision to intervene massively against Israel, but they will do so at the opportune moment, probably when the Israeli occupant is bogged down in Gaza and has suffered another military disaster, which the Resistance might even have an interest in “encouraging” as much as possible, by letting Israel believe that it has no intention of intervening massively. Leaving the enemy in doubt and uncertainty, exerting the necessary pressure to dissuade it from crossing certain limits, and reserving surprises for it, is an art in which Hezbollah and its allies excel, and they must wish for a major Israeli ground incursion into Gaza as ardently as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who have promised to make it the invaders’ graveyard.

The speeches of Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, are by no means empty, bombastic language, but reveal the shared vision of the entire Resistance Axis with regard to the military situation in Gaza, and the unshakeable certainty of an upcoming triumphant victory, which will be multiplied tenfold in the event of a large-scale ground operation. Here are extracts from his speeches on October 30 and 31:

“In the continuity of the heroic battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood that the Palestinian Resistance, led by the Al-Qassam Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades, launched, we stand firm against the aggression, and continue to write chapters of honor and pride and achieve success after success on the road to the inevitable victory, God willing.

Before your very eyes, the Resistance stands proud, its fighters still have their fingers on the trigger and are facing up to the situation on the ground, and the blessed rocket barrages have not stopped, continuing to hit Tel Aviv, Ashdod, Asqelon, Beersheva and the whole area around Gaza, in retaliation for the continuing perpetuation of massacres and the deliberate targeting of our innocent civilians.

Our forces, alongside other Resistance factions, continue their heroic deeds on the battlefield, confronting the futile ground incursion maneuvers carried out by the enemy army under a deluge of fire, in a vain effort to give an illusion of achievement and restore confidence in the Gaza Brigade, which was the main target of the Al-Aqsa Flood.

The enemy is doing its utmost to paint a deceptive image of success, and to boast a mirage of progress and achievement on the ground, but we know full well what its real objectives are. We have maneuvered in the field time and again to deny the enemy opportunities to advance, in accordance with our understanding of the battle.

O army of successive defeats, O caravan of vile rats coming to sully the soil of our worthy and proud Gaza, inform Yoav Gallant [Israeli Defense Minister] and Herzi Halevi [Chief of Staff of the Israeli forces] of what happened to you West of Bayt Lahia, East of Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun, and today in the Zaitoun neighborhood. Tell them how you let yourselves be lured like fools into an ambush of death and into fields of horror. And once again, come forward, for I swear by God, we’re waiting for you with bated breath.

O our Palestinian people, O Arab and Islamic nations, O free men of the world, we continue our battle, the battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood. And at our side is our resilient people, ready for any sacrifice, who continue to chant, despite the bloodshed, his immutable attachment to his cause with the noblest marks of devotion and loyalty, as every Palestinian is ready to give everything on the path to freedom for our people.

With our stance and achievements, we reaffirm, with the support of our people, the value and dignity of our lives. Our people, in all their components and factions, pledge their loyalty to the call to Resistance and stand tall, rising from beneath the rubble, whether as martyrs, draped in the shroud of victory heralded by their sacrifice, or as survivors, shouting with all their might their support for the Resistance, in a scene that dismays the Zionist cowards, who have worked hard to turn the people against us but have failed to separate the Resistance from its popular base. […]

Recently, the Zionist enemy began ground maneuvers on several fronts. The first front is in the north-west of the Gaza Strip, while the second stretches from the eastern center of the Strip to its south-east. They are also present around the Beit Hanoun crossing and in the vicinity of Beit Hanoun.

The criminal enemy approached these fronts after more than 20 days of bombardment using all types of weapons, attempting to displace our population and causing extensive destruction, presumably to restore the image of their defeated army that we shattered on October 7. As soon as these Zionist ground forces reached our defense lines and contact zones, our forces began harassing them and continue to defend themselves against the enemy’s planned attacks on all frontlines.

Our fighters are and have been engaged in fierce confrontations and direct clashes. Despite the enemy’s advance, our fighters have succeeded in engaging enemy forces and destroying 22 Zionist vehicles so far, using the highly penetrating Al-Yassin 105 shells and our devastating explosive guerrilla bombs that have been deployed in this battle.

Our fighters attacked the Zionist forces using various types of explosives and missiles, and they carried out infiltration operations from behind enemy lines in gatherings and advance areas, managing to kill many soldiers of the occupation. We continue to bombard ground forces with mortar shells and short-range missile barrages, while continuing to strike deep into enemy territory with rockets of varying ranges. Our naval forces successfully carried out multiple attacks on several naval targets, using the Al-Asif torpedo which entered service during this battle.

Our defensive operations continue and are only just beginning. By God’s grace and strength, we still have much in store. As we promised the enemy, Gaza will be its graveyard and a nightmare for its soldiers. […]

We affirm that the strategic results of this battle will consist of transformation at all levels and in all directions for the benefit of the Resistance and the project of Liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine, with the grace of God.”

This is on this assessment of the ground that Hezbollah plans its actions. And as Abu Obeida says in conclusion, let us recall that the ultimate goal of the Palestinian Resistance, Hezbollah and the Resistance Axis is not simply to lift the blockade or release the prisoners, to end the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the desecration of Al-Aqsa, nor even to impose a resolution of the conflict with the establishment of two States, a solution dead and buried for a long time due to Israeli colonization, in no way. The strategic goal of the Resistance Axis is to completely wipe out the State of Israel from the map, to expel all settlers and to establish a single Palestinian state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Additionally, following the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Resistance Axis forces announced that their goal was to drive out all U.S. forces from the Middle East. This long-term objective must be accomplished with as little loss of life as possible. It would be the inevitable result of a total regional war (which could have been triggered when Iran struck the US base of Al-Assad in Iraq, a first since Pearl Harbor), but it could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians and Yemenis if it were carried out today, the US empire being in clear decline but not yet in its terminal phase of collapse (even if Covid, the debacle in Afghanistan then in Ukraine and the economic and energy crisis allow us to expect this moment more acutely than ever). Strategic patience requires waiting for the opportune moment, when a war may not even be necessary (or will at least be much less deadly and would not involve NATO forces), for example if the collapse of the United States follows the model of the Soviet Union. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah himself raised the hypothesis during an interview dating from 2019:

“The power of Israel depends essentially on that of the United States. Therefore, if something happens to the United States – like what happened to the USSR, for example a collapse of its economy, internal problems and discord, natural disasters or any other incident that could cause the United States to unite in focusing on their internal problems and reducing their presence and influence in the region – I assure you that the Israelis will pack up on their own and evacuate as soon as possible. Therefore, the destruction of Israel does not necessarily require war.”

Nasrallah stressed it again after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January 2020:

“Within the Axis of Resistance, our will and our objective must be the following: the answer to the murder of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi is to expel American forces from our entire region! If we achieve this goal, and we will achieve it God willing, the Liberation of Al-Quds, of the Palestinian people, the full return of all Palestine and all the holy places of Palestine to the Arab-Muslim Nation will be very close, a stone’s throw away. When the United States leaves our region, these Zionists will pack up and leave (hastily). It may not even require a battle against Israel.”

As difficult as it may be to say and accept, it would not make sense for Hezbollah to start a war that would sacrifice Lebanese civilians by the thousands and destroy the country’s infrastructure in order to save 5,000 or even 10,000 Palestinians. Especially if Hamas can achieve this victory alone, albeit at the cost of enormous sacrifices, as neither Hezbollah nor its allies want to compete with it to take the laurels. If the Resistance in Gaza makes it out by itself, the humiliation will only be greater for the Zionist entity, and will accelerate its inevitable demise: it would be a much greater shock for Israel to be defeated by Gaza alone than by an international coalition of forces, and it would shatter any sense of security for the settlers around Gaza, who might never come back. But if, at any point, the Palestinian cause itself is at stake, if Gaza or the Resistance are on the verge of annihilation, if it is a question of saving Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the Al-Aqsa mosque, Hezbollah and the Resistance Axis will enter the war in full force and will not shy away from any sacrifice, absolutely none, even if it had biblical proportions. Indeed, the ideal would be a Liberation of Al-Quds on the model of the Prophet’s entry into Mecca, that happened without any major combat (because then the superiority of the Muslim armies was so overwhelming that no one dared to oppose it), but if they have no other choice to save Palestine, Hezbollah and the entire Resistance Axis will not back down from Armageddon itself.

Is Hezbollah standing idle?

Last but not least, it should be remembered that since October 7, Hezbollah has not been sitting idle: it has continued to confront Israel on south Lebanon, and to inflict serious losses on its forces. Hezbollah’s policy is simple: initially, it lets the different factions of the Palestinian Resistance in Lebanon hit Israel with rocket attacks, or attempted incursions, which it unofficially covers and facilitates but without officially participating; secondly, when the occupier retaliates, Hezbollah declares that it cannot tolerate this aggression against Lebanon, and that it will respond (by the way, this is in no way impudent: according to international law, an occupied people has the right to use force to liberate their lands; an occupier only has the right to pack up, and cannot ever invoke self-defense): thus Hezbollah can support the Palestinian Resistance without departing from the defined rules of engagement against Israel, and carry out daily attacks against Israeli bases, troops and settlements along the whole border (all the videos of Hezbollah operations are displayed on this Telegram channel) without the situation escalating into a total war.

Image

The Lebanese Resistance has just published this graph which indicates the losses inflicted on the occupier between October 8 and 30 “as part of operations on the road to the liberation of Al-Quds”: 120 Israeli soldiers were killed or injured, 65,000 settlers were evacuated from 28 settlements, 13 armed vehicles were destroyed (2 armored personnel carriers, 2 Humvees and 9 tanks) and 105 military sites were targeted. In addition, 69 communications systems, 17 jamming systems and 27 intelligence systems, 140 cameras, 33 radars and 1 drone were destroyed, so that Israel is almost completely blinded to what is happening on the Lebanese border, which would facilitate a major ground offensive from Lebanon. For its part, Hezbollah announced 49 martyrs so far: these are indeed low-intensity clashes, but on both sides, the losses in soldiers already represent almost a third of those of the entire July 2006 war, which is far from insignificant. Especially since this daily pressure on the occupier does not only represent moral support, but indeed military support. As Sheikh Naïm Qassem, Deputy Secretary General of Hezbollah, declared, Israel has amassed 5 brigades around Gaza, and 3 brigades on the Lebanese border: without the threat that Hezbollah poses to Israel, 8 brigades would be amassed around Gaza. It is therefore above all a matter of dividing the enemy’s forces, and of leaving its command in uncertainty, in order to paralyze its decisions and its willingness to massively commit its forces against the Palestinian Resistance. In this regard, the success is undeniable: to be convinced of this, one only needs to listen to the confused and contradictory declarations of Netanyahu, his ministers and the Israeli general staff on the launch of the ground operation, its timing, its scale, its objectives, etc.

Lebanon: Hassan Nasrallah discusses developments with Ziyad Al-Nakhalah (Islamic Jihad) and Salah Al-Arouri (Hamas)

Additionally, Hezbollah is directly involved in the daily operations of the Resistance in Gaza, working closely with Hamas and Islamic Jihad cadres based in Lebanon in a common command room. Following Nasrallah’s high-profile meeting with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders on October 25, Hamas political leader Salah al-Arouri said:

“We are witnessing a heroic epic of Resistance in Lebanon against the occupier along the southern borders, where daily clashes break out and where martyrs fall daily among Hezbollah, the Al-Quds Brigades and the Al-Qassam Brigades. Hezbollah operates at all military and political levels, and our battle is also their battle. We share one goal and one destiny. Our struggle is united, our destiny is shared towards Al-Quds. We are in constant coordination in this battle.

Not all of our meetings with Hezbollah are public. We met Sayed Hassan Nasrallah on the first day of the battle. We are in constant meetings and maintain deep and precise communication with all the Resistance forces and our Hezbollah brothers, with Sayed Nasrallah on the front line.

If the enemy invades by land, it will mark a new and glorious chapter for our people and an unprecedented defeat for the occupation in the history of the Israeli-Arab struggle. Punishment for the crimes of the occupation is inevitable. We assure our people that the Resistance is doing well despite the crimes of the enemy and will ease your hearts regarding the extent of your suffering in the event of a brutal ground attack.

To the occupation, I declare this: be ready, because the battle has not yet begun.”

It is more than likely that Hezbollah was not surprised by the October 7 operation nor by its spectacular success, Nasrallah having constantly warned Israel not to underestimate the Palestinian Resistance, and to fear a massive reaction if they did not stop their ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and their provocations at the Al-Aqsa mosque: “Don’t miscalculate”, he kept warning the Israeli occupier and his new fascist government. We can even say that the Lebanese Resistance, which, thanks to its experience of liberating territories occupied by ISIS and Al-Nusra in Syria, has been planning an operation to invade Israel and liberate the Galilee for years, has transmitted its expertise to the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, which took the Israeli army completely by surprise by launching an operation it expected on its northern border. Hezbollah is therefore directly linked to all aspects of the terrain and the situation, and assists the Resistance factions in all possible ways, similar to what the United States is doing for Israel.

What now?

Hezbollah’s decisions are influenced neither by the threats of enemies, nor by the reproaches (or even bitter insults) of friends who allow themselves to be carried away by emotion and see in Hezbollah’s attitude cowardice or a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. Hezbollah has never cared about “saving face” and is only driven by its long-term strategic vision, which is entirely focused on the total liberation of Palestine and the ways to achieve this strategic objective while minimizing sacrifices, if possible. Those who consider the eradication of Israel an unrealizable illusion are the same people who, in 1982, would have considered the desire of the nascent Hezbollah to expel by force the Israeli army which occupied half of Lebanon, or who, before October 7, would have found it inconceivable that the Resistance in Gaza could break the siege and inflict such losses and humiliation on the enemy. The red lines which, if crossed, would bring in Hezbollah and the Resistance Axis with all its firepower are probably clearly drawn, but it would not be wise to divulge them: it would be telling Israel that he can go this far without risking an all-out war. Leaving the enemy in confusion and exerting controlled pressure on the Lebanese border is the best strategy for this phase of the battle: Hezbollah demonstrates that he is present, that he is not afraid of confrontation or of escalation, and that he is ready for open war.

Whatever happens, October 7 will go down in history as a resounding victory for the Palestinian Resistance, and an earthquake for Israel. No massacre, no destruction, no genocide can ever erase it. As Sheikh Naïm Qassem pointed out, Israel has little choice today but between being content with the crushing defeat it has already suffered, or persisting in blind revenge and suffering discredit and defeat on a much bigger scale. Each of these two scenarios is satisfactory for the Palestinian Resistance and its allies, who will not abandon it, whatever the price to pay. And already, the confidence of Israeli society in its army and in itself, which has only become more fragile over the last two decades, is irremediably broken, and the process of remigration of Israeli settlers to Europe and America will only accelerate.

Hassan Nasrallah’s speech announced for November 3, in tribute to the martyrs of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance who fell in recent days, will finally break the silence of the Hezbollah Secretary General, an expert in psychological warfare, whose silence as well as his speeches are feared and deciphered by Israel. He will not necessarily make thunderous announcements, though many people expect him to do so, but he will clarify the very tense situation on the Lebanese border, which is getting worse every day, and could degenerate into open conflict at any time. Of all the speeches Nasrallah has given, this is probably the one that will be the most eagerly awaited and followed by both friends and enemies of the Party of God and Palestine.

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Review: Against Our Better Judgment, by Alison Weir

The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel

BY RICHARD C. COOK • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 1, 2023

As the crisis involving the Israelis and Palestinians deepens after the October 7 Hamas attack, we might pause to examine how the state of Israel was created in the first place. At the current juncture, as World War III looms on the horizon, as massacres are currently being perpetrated by Israel against the civilian population of Gaza, with a death toll exceeding 9,000, of which over 4,000 are children, and as a Western armada is gathering in the eastern Mediterranean, it is befitting to review journalist Alison Weir’s book Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. The book was published in 2014, is packed with often hard-to-access details, and is masterfully documented. Alison Weir is also head of a group she has founded: If Americans Knew.

Alison Weir’s book is crucially important in considering ways to gain a broader perspective in order to defuse the situation. It is also of keen interest with respect to the larger potential conflict, where U.S. political leaders are again trotting out the phrase, “Axis of Evil,” this time to describe the nations of Russia, China, and Iran. (Sometimes North Korea is tossed in for good measure.) It’s Iran, of course, that U.S. leaders are identifying as an alleged sponsor of the resistance groups in and around Palestine, including Hamas.

Following are what I view as the main points from Alison Weir’s book. My own interspersed editorial comments are in italics. Page numbers are given in parentheses only for quotations from the book.

Origin of Zionism in the U.S. Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel begins by explaining that support for Zionism, defined as the desire for creation of a Jewish national state somewhere in the world, goes back in U.S. history to the late 1880s, around the time that the Zionist Movement was becoming prominent in Europe. By the 1910s, there were thousands of U.S. adherents, though many Jews opposed Zionism as not in the interests of the Jewish people and certain to result in antagonism toward them. Probably a majority of Jews in the U.S. had never even heard of Zionism and/or were happy to have assimilated into American society. In fact, there was nothing that could even be viewed remotely as an “anti-Semitism problem” in the U.S. at this time.

Role of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis and Creation of the Parushim. Still, some very powerful people became Zionists, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose main disciple was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Brandeis formed a secret organization called the Parushim, whose sole purpose was to bring about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This Zionist organization required an oath that appeared to give life and death power over its sworn members.

“Parushim,” also spelled “Purushim,” is the Hebrew word from which the name “Pharisees” is derived, meaning “separatists.” From the Pharisees came Rabbinical Judaism and the idea that, “We should not assimilate or acculturate at all.” (prezi.com) I would note that Alison Weir’s book did not aim at giving an account of the deeper motivations of the Zionist movement, other than its claim to be a reaction to European “anti-Semitism.” For more depth, I would recommend a careful reading of the classic The Controversy of Zion by British journalist Douglas Reed (1895-1976).

Justice Louis Brandeis was close to Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff. Brandeis was also closely involved with the creation of the Federal Reserve System, as was Schiff, though Brandeis’s involvement in political issues was largely behind the scenes.

The Federal Reserve, I would add, was largely a project of the U.S. Money Trust and the British/European Rothschilds. The Rothschilds were also heavily involved in Zionism and in the creation and support of the Zionist state. The fact that Zionism was sponsored by some incredibly rich people might cause us to ask to what extent financial rewards played a role in the rapid conversion of many Jews and non-Jews to Zionism during this period. For information on creation of the Federal Reserve, see my own book, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).

Collaboration Between the Parushim and Great Britain. Justice Louis Brandeis’s Parushim worked closely with Zionists in Great Britain, including travel back and forth, to persuade the British government to designate Palestine as a future Jewish homeland. This was after Zionist leaders had rejected such locations as Kenya. Thus was created a “contract” between Britain and the Parushim that if the British would generate what became the Balfour Declaration, the U.S. Zionists would endeavor to assure U.S. entrance into World War I against Germany on the side of Britain. This contract was fulfilled by both parties, though, as in the U.S., many British Jews opposed Zionism for similar reasons—as a threat to Jewish assimilation.

The Balfour Declaration specified that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” (p.97) At the time, non-Jewish communities made up 92 percent of the population of Palestine.

Zionism and the Failure to Make Peace with the Ottoman Empire. World War I begin in 1914. By 1915-1916, the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany but not at war against the U.S., offered to make a separate peace with the U.S. The Ottomans had also offered to allow the Jews of Europe to live at peace anywhere in their empire. The U.S. sent a delegation to negotiate this separate peace, but Brandeis informed the British Zionists that the delegation was on its way. The British Zionists then send their leader, Chaim Weizmann, to intercept the U.S. delegation at Gibraltar, where he prevailed on it to call off the negotiations. The reason was that the British were going to lay claim to Palestine after the war as a homeland for the Jews, so they wanted to assure that Palestine was going to be available for British control. The British design was to break up the Ottoman Empire, not leave it intact through a separate U.S.-instigated peace.

Warnings Against the Zionist Project. Diplomats within the U.S. State Department both in Washington, D.C., and in the Middle East were aware of and warned against the Zionist project, arguing that a million Palestinians would be displaced or made virtual servants/slaves of the invaders.

World War I. In 1917 the U.S. entered the war on the side of Britain, per the Zionist agreement, and Germany was defeated, along with the Ottomans. Britain also signed a secret agreement with France by which it would get control of Palestine after the war. Control was implemented through the vehicle of a British Mandate approved by the League of Nations.

During this period, antagonism against Jews had begun to grow within U.S. society, partly in reaction to perceptions that Jews controlled the banks and other financial institutions. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” had also appeared. While claimed to be a forgery from Czarist Russia, the Protocols received credence and publicity from Henry Ford and others.

Germany was aware that the Zionists had contributed to the defeat of Germany in WWI. This contributed to the anti-Jewish attitudes of Germans after the war and was a factor in the later Nazi anti-Jewish policies.

During WWI, the Parushim gave the FBI a list of Americans who were opponents to Zionism or the war. Many of these people were arrested and sent to prison. Through all of this, Brandeis was directing matters from behind the scenes. He was arguably the most powerful person in the U.S., but his political activities were secret or carried out through proxies.

At the end of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson sent a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation. Known as the King-Crane Commission, its report “recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.” The report stated that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” that “armed force would be required to accomplish this,” and that “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.” The report of the King-Crane Commission “was suppressed.” (p.25)

Zionism After World War I. Between the two world wars, a growing number of U.S. Zionists worked to further the project for the creation of Israel. In Germany, the Zionists supported the rise of the Nazis, as this would lead to German Jews wanting to emigrate to Palestine. In Iraq, where the Jewish leaders did not support Zionism, Iraqi Jews were attacked, even murdered, to force them to emigrate to Palestine. Without arousing the anxiety of Jews around the world that they were unsafe in their homelands, Zionist planners believed there would not be enough Jewish settlers to create a Zionist state and force the Palestinians out.

Opponents of Zionism in the U.S. diplomatic service were threatened with having their careers destroyed if they did not support the claims that Jews in foreign countries were suffering discrimination so should want to move to Palestine. The Zionists worked to limit immigration opportunities for Jews elsewhere than Palestine, including the U.S. The Zionists opposed measures by the British government to limit the number of Jews who could enter Palestine.

Collaboration Between the Zionists and Nazis. Building on work by author Hannah Arendt, Edwin Black wrote The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Click Here According to author Tom Segev, “Arendt stated that many Jews would have survived ‘had their leaders not helped the Nazis organize the concentration of Jews in the ghettos, their deportation to the east, and their transport to the death camps.’” (p.146) This was called the “Haavara Agreement.”

The famous 1930s Jewish boycott of German products may have been instigated by Zionists to promote anti-Jewish sentiment leading to more desire among Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Other Zionists made claims that persecuted Jews were prone to becoming revolutionary communists for the same purpose.

Zionist Activities Between the World Wars. In the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist leaders muffled talk of a Jewish state in Palestine and focused on creating new institutions there as altruistic enterprises. An example was Hebrew University, opening in Jerusalem in 1925. Zionist leaders complained that most U.S. Jews saw themselves first and foremost as American citizens. Organizations like the American Zionist Emergency Council and the United Jewish Appeal were founded to generate funding and support. Donations to the United Jewish Appeal in 1948 was four times that of the American Red Cross. Pro-Zionist publicity and lobbying efforts were unleashed across the U.S. Some Jews, like the American Council for Judaism, still opposed Zionism as inimical to real Jewish interests. The ACJ opposed the Zionists’ “anti-Semitic racialist lie that Jews the world over were a separate, national body.” (p.152)

Zionist advocacy in the U.S. had powerful political adherents. New York Congressman Emanuel Celler told President Harry Truman, “We’ll run you out of town,” if he did not support the program. Senator Jacob Javits said, “We’ll fight to the death and make a Jewish state in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.” (p.38) Zionist propaganda included funding of best-selling pro-Zionist books by non-Jews. Zionists such as wealthy Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermyer began to interject “dispensationalist” ideas of “Christian Zionism” into the discourse through sponsorship of the “Scofield Reference Bible.” (Untermyer was also a leading backer of the Federal Reserve and advocate of the worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany.)

Today, as we all know, “Christian Zionism” among “evangelicals” is part of the bedrock support of the Israel Lobby. Leading evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell received large donations from Zionist supporters. An entire “dispensationalist” mythology involving the “Rapture,” etc., has been constructed and promoted to justify the political union between this group of American religionists and the most extreme factions of Israeli politics led today by such figures as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Netanyahu has surfaced this mad mythology to cover Israeli genocide in Gaza, the topic is not covered in detail in Alison Weir’s book, so will not be dealt with further here.

Protestant Support of Zionism. By the 1930s, U.S. Zionists were trying to organize American Protestants in their support. By the end of WWII the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee to 6,500. The appeal to Protestants was based on generating sympathy for refugees, though no mention was made of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians becoming refugees due to the Zionist takeover. During the Israeli war of independence in 1947-1949, Christian churches and institutions in Palestine were assaulted by the Zionists along with the Palestinians.

Beginnings of Terrorism and U.N. Partition of Palestine. In Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists tried to buy Palestinian land but few inhabitants wished to sell. The Zionists then began to organize terrorist forces to drive them out. These terrorist groups also targeted British government officials, as Palestine was still a British Mandate. Author Alison Weir cites a statement by David ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, that suggests this was at least part of what started today’s worldwide phenomenon of terrorism.

By the start of the 1947-1949 war, Jews made up 30 percent of the Palestinian population but owned only 6-7 percent of the land. In 1947, Britain turned its Palestine Mandate over to the U.N. A General Assembly resolution to partition gave the Zionists 55 percent of the land of Palestine. The U.S. State Department opposed the partition plan as against the wishes of local people and in violation of U.S. interests and of democratic principles. Officials warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” (p.45) Officials said the proposal was for “a theocratic racial state” that discriminated “on grounds of religion and race.” (p.45) The leading anti-Zionist Department of State official, Loy Henderson, was exiled by his superiors to a post as ambassador to Nepal.

U.S. Government Opposition to Zionism. Nevertheless, virtually the entire U.S. executive branch was opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Statements and reports were made by a 1946 commission headed by Ambassador Henry F. Grady, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. A 1948 report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that, “The Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” (p.47)

Jewish leaders were well aware that U.N. partitioning of Palestine was temporary and that over time, the Jewish state would expand to absorb the entire region. The concept of “Eretz Israel” was formulated, whereby the Zionist state would encompass Transjordan, as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria. Zionists also had begun using U.S. antagonism toward the Soviet Union as an argument for creation of a pro-Western Jewish state. This hearkened back to the early days of Zionism, when Zionist leaders characterized their proposed state as a bulwark of British influence in the Middle East; i.e., as an extension of British colonialism and geopolitics.

Today, pro-Zionists make the argument that Israel is an outpost of benign “Judeo-Christian” influence in the Middle East, as they try to arouse antagonism toward the one billion Muslims in the world in a purported “clash of civilizations.” Such attitudes became prominent in U.S. politics during the “War on Terror” of the Bush/Cheney administration that continues today through U.S. labeling of anti-Zionist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorist” organizations. This is despite the historical fact cited above that it was the Zionists who introduced terrorism into the Middle East.

U.S. Recognition of Israel and the Role of President Truman. The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel as an independent state when on May 14, 1948, President Harry Truman issued a statement of recognition following Israel’s proclamation of independence on the same date. Truman’s main motivation was believed at the time, and still is today, the winning of Jewish support in the presidential election that year. His decision was strongly opposed by Secretary of State George Marshall, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the CIA and National Security Council, and top State Department official George Kennan. Intelligence agent Kermit Roosevelt wrote: “The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict.” (p.51) Contrary to the belief that U.S. oil interests promoted the Zionist project, officials argued that U.S. ability to access Middle Eastern resources would be adversely affected. Truman also had pro-Zionist insiders at high levels of his administration.

Author Alison Weir points out that bribery also played a part. “Gore Vidal wrote: ‘Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’” (p.167) Jewish businessman Abraham Feinberg explained his raising of cash for Truman in an oral history interview published by the Truman Library in 1973. The CIA also discovered Feinberg’s illegal gun-running to Zionist groups.

I may be the first writer to point out that Truman’s action in accepting bribes, if discovered, could have been seen and treated as an impeachable offense.

Zionist Takeover of Palestine. At the time of Israel’s proclamation of independence and immediate U.S. recognition, the U.N. resolution of partition had been passed, with war ensuing between Zionist and Arab forces. The U.N. General Assembly adopted the partition plan by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, with many nations subjected to intense Zionist lobbying and threats. For instance, “Financier and longtime presidential adviser Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition.” (p.55) A Swedish U.N. mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was killed by Zionist assassins. To this day, no accepted legal authority for the U.N. in its partitioning of Palestine has ever been demonstrated. In other words, it was likely an extra-legal action in response to Zionist lobbying.

Though sporadic violence between Jews and Palestinian Arabs had taken place over the previous two decades, the Zionists committed wholesale massacres of Palestinians after the U.N. resolution for partition. By the end of Israel’s war of independence in 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from Zionist-controlled territory. Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote: “Israel was born of terror, war, and revolution, and its creation required a measure of fanaticism and cruelty.” (p.58) Today this is called in Arabic the “Nakba”—“catastrophe.”

The most well-known massacre took place at the village of Deir Yessin in April 1948, before any Arab armies had joined the fight. There, 254 villagers were murdered in cold blood. The heads of two militias present at Deir Yessin, Irgun and the Stern Gang, were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1947, killing 86. The Stern Gang also solicited aid from the Axis powers during WWII.

Zionist Front Organizations in the U.S. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists created a number of front organizations to raise money used to finance militant activities in Palestine. After WWII, the U.S. maintained an arms embargo against Israel and the Middle East. Foremost among the sponsors of the front organizations intended to skirt the embargo was Irgun. One group, the Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinians Jews, claimed it was formed to fight the Nazis in Europe, but was intended instead to fight the British and Arabs in Palestine. These groups espoused such radical ideologies as the idea that “non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan, and that the world was created solely for Jews.” (p.67) Another group, headed by Orthodox Rabbi Baruch Korff, hatched a plot to blow up the British foreign office in London that was exposed in the New York Herald Tribune. Through political influence, U.S. charges against Korff were dropped. Later he “became a close friend and fervent supporter of President Richard Nixon, who called him ‘my rabbi.’” (p.71) Nixon’s support for Israel manifested in the gigantic airlift of military supplies that helped save Israel from defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Another major organization raising money for sending arms to the Zionists in Palestine was the Sonneborn Institute. Between 1939 and May 1948, the Jewish Agency for Israel was also active, raising the equivalent today of $3.5 billion.

Zionism and Organized Crime. Financial backers of Israeli independence included members of organized crime, including Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Mafia in the U.S. In an April 19, 2018 article in Tablet (tabletmag.com) entitled “Gangsters for Zion: Yom Ha’atzmaut: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence. Robert Rockaway wrote: “In 1945, the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Israeli government headed by David Ben-Gurion, created a vast clandestine arms-purchasing-and-smuggling network throughout the United States. The operation was placed under the aegis of the Haganah, the underground forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, and involved hundreds of Americans from every walk of life. They included millionaires, rabbinical students, scrap-metal merchants, ex-GIs, college students, longshoremen, industrialists, chemists, engineers, Protestants and Catholics, as well as Jews. One group, who remained anonymous and rarely talked about, were men who were tough, streetwise, unafraid, and had access to ready cash: Jewish gangsters.” Rockaway, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, also wrote that through their control of U.S. ports, the Jewish mob arranged for arms deliveries to Israel aboard vessels flying the flag of Panama.

Recruiting Jews to Relocate to Palestine. “Zionist cadres infiltrated displaced persons’ camps that had been set up to house refugees displaced during WWII. These infiltrators tried secretly to funnel people to Palestine. When it turned out that most didn’t want to go to Palestine, they worked to convince them—sometimes by force.” (p.74) Another recruiting source was Jewish foster children in Christian homes. The Zionists claimed to be the sole representative of all the world’s Jews in order to legitimize efforts to divert war survivors to Israel, not to countries like the U.S. to which many preferred to go. “After a voluntary recruitment drive netted less than 0.3 percent of the DP [displaced persons] population, a compulsory draft was implemented.” (p.79) Some draftees were required to fight in Palestine in the Zionist war of independence. Meanwhile, the secretive Sieff group was formed in Washington, D.C., to carry out back channel lobbying for the Zionist project. The group was protected by such powerful individuals as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and the aforementioned financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch.

Fate of the Palestinian Refugees. Three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees fled to neighboring regions in a gigantic humanitarian disaster. A 1948 State Department report stated “The total direct relief offered…by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.” (p.83) The value of land confiscated by the Zionists amounted to $5.2 trillion in today’s dollars. Christians also suffered as “numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians.” (p.83) Efforts by U.S. government officials to withhold aid to the Israeli government due to the refugee crisis were overruled by President Truman.

Zionism and the media. Even as early as WWI, the Zionists exerted almost complete control over the U.S. press. This included placing pro-Zionist articles in prestigious newspapers like The New York Times. In 1953, author Alfred Lilienthal wrote: “The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” (p.86) Zionist coercion extended to withdrawal of advertising, cancellation of subscriptions, and blacklisting of journalists and authors, even those offering a mere trace of sympathy toward the displaced Palestinians. Particularly emotional in their support of Zionism were the journals the Nation and the New Republic. An example of how the Zionists could destroy an author’s career was the attack on then-famous journalist Dorothy Thompson after “she began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight, and condemned Jewish terrorism. (p.92)

We all know that the complete slanting of U.S. media coverage toward Zionism and Israel dominates news reporting at all levels and across the ideological spectrum, from the top newspapers and networks to what is left of small town journalism. This includes so-called “independent” outlets like Breitbart. The start of this bias began, perhaps not coincidentally, during the time before WWI when the newsrooms of U.S. newspapers were taken over by propagandists sympathetic to the Federal Reserve System and the Money Trust. Today, of course, we have the internet, which has begun to make inroads into the control of the news by pro-establishment media corporations and Deep State censors. Internet outlets also must be cautious, however, so are often reduced to the role of “limited hangouts,” reporting only selected stories that protest particularly egregious Israeli offenses, but never the “big picture.”

In conclusion we can say that, as Alison Weir’s book makes clear, it was largely American Zionists who financed and enabled the violent takeover of Palestine and who thereby share responsibility over the past three-quarters of a century for the atrocities committed against a diverse population whose forebears had been living in peace and rooted in the region for millenniums. This population also inhabited the holy city of Jerusalem, sacred to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions.

The book also makes it clear that people can oppose Zionism—the forceful establishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine—without being anti-Jewish or “anti-Semitic.” Of course, most of the indigenous people of Palestine are “Semites” in ethnicity and language. Also, the most forceful opponents of the original Zionist movement in Great Britain, the U.S., and possibly other nations, have been, and still are, Jews themselves who had successfully assimilated into their host cultures. Examples are the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jews in Iran who refuse to support Israel.

Many more volumes could or should be written about U.S. enabling of Israel and Zionism and about Israel’s and Zionism’s interference in internal U.S. affairs. I would include an examination of Israel’s possible participation in the JFK/RFK assassinations and the 9/11 attacks, U.S. acquiescence in Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Israel’s links with the Neocons who control today’s U.S. foreign policy, and today’s courting of World War III against more than half the world’s countries, starting with Israel’s nemesis, Iran. Will the U.S. stumble into WWIII because of its pro-Zionist captivity?

Copyright 2023 by Richard C. Cook. Comments are welcome and will be read at monetaryreform@gmail.com.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst who served with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he broke the story of the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle. After serving at Treasury, he exposed the disastrous flaws of a monetary system controlled by private finance in his book We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. As an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and while working with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he advocated the replacement of the Federal Reserve System with a genuine national currency. His latest book is Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).

Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014.

November 2, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Shedding is Real: FLCCC Weekly Update (Nov. 1, 2023)

FLCCC ALLIANCE

What is “shedding” and what are the implications for our health? Tonight, host Betsy Ashton will be joined by Dr. Pierre Kory and Scott Marsland, FNP-C for this important discussion.

https://flccc.net

Program starts at the 3:30 mark:

Alternate link

https://rumble.com/v3szh6x-shedding-is-real-flccc-weekly-update-nov.-1-2023.html

November 1, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Potential Health Risks of mRNA-Based Vaccine Platforms

Despite 30 Years of Development, Thousands of Patents, Basic Questions are Unanswered

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | November 1, 2023

My clinical practice is loaded with patients who took one or two vaccines early in 2021 and realized like most of us that the the mRNA products were not safe. A common question is: “doctor when does this shot get out of my body?”

Acevedo-Whitehouse and Bruno raise this point in a recent peer reviewed publication concerning the entire mRNA vaccine product pipeline.

Therapeutic applications of synthetic mRNA were proposed more than 30 years ago, and are currently the basis of one of the vaccine platforms used at a massive scale as part of the public health strategy to get COVID-19 under control. To date, there are no published studies on the biodistribution, cellular uptake, endosomal escape, translation rates, functional half-life and inactivation kinetics of synthetic mRNA, rates and duration of vaccine-induced antigen expression in different cell types. Furthermore, despite the assumption that there is no possibility of genomic integration of therapeutic synthetic mRNA, only one recent study has examined interactions between vaccine mRNA and the genome of transfected cells, and reported that an endogenous retrotransposon, LINE-1 is unsilenced following mRNA entry to the cell, leading to reverse transcription of full length vaccine mRNA sequences, and nuclear entry. This finding should be a major safety concern, given the possibility of synthetic mRNA-driven epigenetic and genomic modifications arising.

These are stunning revelations. I have called for a halt on mRNA research development until these fundamental questions can be answered. If synthetic mRNA cannot be broken down by the human body, there were be no way to shut off potentially dangerous antigens such as the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, Influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA), or any other toxin produced from the genetic code. To make matters worse, it appears that all of these proteins will be expressed on the cell surface and cause auto-immunity with any new mRNA vaccine. This alone is a show stopper for me in my practice. I am advising NO mRNA vaccines for my patients.

Acevedo-Whitehouse K, Bruno R. Potential health risks of mRNA-based vaccine therapy: A hypothesis. Med Hypotheses. 2023 Feb;171:111015. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2023.111015. Epub 2023 Jan 25. PMID: 36718314; PMCID: PMC9876036.

November 1, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

Real Names of Stolen Villages, Illegal Settlements of the Gaza Perimeter

By Perla Issa | Institute For Palestine Studies | October 25, 2023

If you are to read Western news reports coming from Israel, you would likely believe that Kfar Azza, Be’eri, Erez, Nahal Oz, and the other settlements that surround Gaza are “idyllic spots,” “little pieces of paradise, little pieces of heaven;” and “small farming communities.”

What is missing from this picture, what is missing from the vast majority of Western news reports on the genocide unfolding in Gaza is that these “pieces of paradise” are built on stolen land — stolen by Zionists from the Palestinian people through violence. And that the Palestinian population have been huddled and caged in one small corner of their original lands for over 75 years. That is what is currently called the Gaza Strip. About 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, refugees from what today is called the Gaza perimeter. As Palestinian resistance increased over the years, as Palestinians, generation after generation, have tried to break the cage and return home, that cage has become tighter and tighter.

That is how the Israeli residents of these “farming communities” — around 50,000 people living on 1,038 squared kilometers of stolen lands (the Sha’ar HaNegev, Eshkol, and Sdot Negev regional councils)— have been able for years to live, prosper, raise families, have dinners, swim in pools, dance, sing and celebrate “unity and love” in large concerts just a few kilometers away from where over 2.1 million people live on 365 squared kilometers, usurped from their lands, subjugated to daily humiliation, purposely impoverished and caged in, unable to move, live, fish in the sea, and certainly unable to celebrate “unity and love.”

A simple glance at Google maps puts this reality in plain sight. How can such an urban reality exist? A people density of 5,753 people per squared kilometer next to a people density of 48 people per squared kilometer. Can there be any doubt that in order to keep such a reality for decades a vast amount of daily violence needs to be applied in order to prevent any spill over?

Google Maps screenshot of the Gaza Strip and surrounding area, showing the wide disparity in urban density between Palestinian and Israeli-controlled areas. Taken on Oct 16, 2023. The image used as the header of this article, however, is a historic map from 1948 from Palestine Open Maps.

Palestinians live this reality on a daily basis, while Israelis, living in “idyllic spots,” thought that they could afford to forget it. They thought they could afford to forget how they came to live on that very land.

Let us here, remind ourselves of this reality.

In an oral history project of interviews with Zionist fighters, the truth is spoken plainly and simply. Michael Cohen from the Negev Brigade of the Israeli Occupation Forces (Formed from the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah) explains in a recorded video how the brigade expelled Palestinians in October 1948 from what “today you would call the Gaza Perimeter. It’s the entire Western sector bordering on today’s Gaza Strip.” He explains how “expelling was easy.” That the majority of the Palestinians “had no plans to hurt us” but that “we couldn’t allow ourselves, we, as an army and the [Jewish] settlements around us, to leave Arab settlements in our underbelly. We kicked them out.”

He explains how in many places, Palestinians left without a fight: “On one or two occasions, there was some sort of resistance, even using firearms. But that was rare … The Negev was cleared of all villages!” But with time the soldiers realized that the people they had expelled were coming back and that “it was difficult to finish the job with them.” He explains that they had to block them, “block means shoot to kill!” In his own words: “So in that case I saw it with my own eyes, I didn’t just see it with my own eyes, I also did it. Expulsion was one thing that needed to be done and it was done.”

Indeed, violent expulsion was done, but violence breeds violence. Through Cohen’s testimony we can see how Palestinian resistance was changing and adapting in response to Israeli violence. The villagers and Bedouins went from friendly coexistence, to acquiescence, to non-violent resistance by quietly returning to their lands, but once faced with deadly force, they resorted to armed resistance, they started attacking roads and planting mines. The Israeli response was more violence, they demolished Palestinian homes and burned fields forcing the population to flee again. Cohen explains how they planted explosives and “would topple down the houses in one full swoop.” He further explains: “The demolition [of the houses] and/or the burning of the fields, it wasn’t a one-time thing during the deportation, it was a process.”

Avri Ya’ari of the Haganah explains in another recorded video how they expelled the people of Huj (هوج), a Palestinian village lying 2.5 kilometers from the current Israeli settlement of Sderot and 6.5 kilometers from the Gaza Strip; where Ariel Sharon built a ranch. Through Ya’ari’s testimony we get a sense of the large disproportionate of force between the Israeli armed forces and the Palestinians and again we see how the Palestinian population was peaceful.

Ya’ari: There was Huj … but the relations with them were very good …

Interviewer: The Arab population, when did they leave the area?

Ya’ari: When they were told to. [Laughter]

Interviewer: What do you mean?

Ya’ari: They were told to take a hike.

Interviewer: Who told them?

Ya’ari: The army, the Israeli Defense Forces. In certain stages … how should I say it? They cleared the area of Arabs. The people of Huj, who had been very friendly and later suffered terribly in the refugee camps, they told them, they’d be back in two or three weeks.

Palestinians indeed have been attempting to return ever since by any and all means at their disposal. Therefore, if you wish to help end the violence, to usher in peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis, then recognize what lands Israeli settlements have been built on and call them by their names, their real names. In the table below is a list of some of the settlements that surround Gaza and the corresponding Palestinian lands that they have been built on, whether it be city, village, or tribal lands.

 

Israeli settlement

Name of depopulated Palestinian city that corresponding Israeli settlement is built on Name of depopulated Palestinian village that corresponding Israeli settlement is built on Name of depopulated Tribal land that corresponding  Israeli settlement is built on Additional notes from author
Ashkelon Al-Majdal (المجدل)

Al-Jura (الجورة),

Al-Khisas (الخصاص),

Ni’ilya (نعليا)

Built on the village lands and orchards
Zikim Hirbiya (هربيا) Built on the citrus groves of the village
Karmiya Hirbiya (هربيا) Built on the orchards of the village
Mavqiim Barbara (بربرة) Built on the village and its orchards
Erez Dimra (دمرة)
Sderot Najd (نجد)
Mefalsim Wadi ez Zeit of Gaza city
Kfar Aza Turkman quarter of Gaza city
Nahal Oz Waqf Esh Sheikh Zarif in Gaza city (وقف الشيخ ظريف)
Sa’ad Jdeide quarter of Gaza city
Alumin Turkman quarter of Gaza city
Be’eri Wuhaitat al Tarabin (الوحيدات ترابين) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe lands
Re’im Ghawali al-Zari’i (غوالي الزريعي) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe lands Built next to the ancient ruins of Tell Jamma (تل جمة) in the Gaza valley
Kisufim Abu Khammash (ابو خماش) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe lands
En HaShlosha Ma’in Abu Sitta village (معين ابو ستة), Umm Tina hamlet (ام تينة) part of the Arab al Ghawali (عرب الغوالي) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe Umm Tina is described in an oral history project by a former villager as “fertile land extending as far as the eye can see, wide and spacious, with almond orchards and fields of wheat, barley, lentils, watermelons, and cantaloupes … a wonderful country.”
Nirim Ma’in Abu Sitta village (معين ابو ستة), part of the Arab al Ghawali (عرب الغوالي) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe Built on the ruins of the village’s former school
Nir Oz Ma’in Abu Sitta village (معين ابو ستة), part of the Arab al Ghawali (عرب الغوالي) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe Built on the village orchards
Magen Ma’in Abu Sitta village (معين ابو ستة), Abu Tailakh (أبو تيلخ) and Abu Nuqeira (ابو نقيرة) hamlets Part of Arab al Ghawali (عرب الغوالي) clan of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe Built on the village orchards, engulfing the shrine of Sheikh Nuran (مقام الشيخ نوران ) and the Abu Qurayda spring (بئر أبو قريدة)
Ami’Oz,

Zohar,

Ohad,

Mivtahim,

Yesha

Umm ‘Ajwe  (أم عجوة) and Tell Rabiya (تل رابية) hamlets Part of the Najmat clan (نجمات ) of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe
Sde Nitsan,

Talmei Eliyahu

Karm ‘Aqel (كرم عقل) Part of the Najmat clan (نجمات ) of the Tarabin (ترابين) tribe
Holit El-Buhdari hamlet (كرم البهداري) Part of the Najmat al-Kassar (نجمات القصار) clan of the Tarabin tribe (ترابين) Built on the village orchards
Peri-Gan,

Sede-Avraham, Deqel,

Talme-Yosef,

Avshalom,

Yated,

Yevul

El-Ahmar (كرم الاحمر) and El-Khilawi (كرم الخلاوي) hamlet Part of the Najmat al-Kassar (نجمات القصار) clan of the Tarabin tribe (ترابين) Built on the village orchards

Editor’s Note: This is not an exhaustive list. Feel free to contact the author directly at perla@palestine-studies.org. You may also seek additional resources such as All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Places section)Palestine Open MapsPalestine Remembered, and The Return Journey (Atlas) for further reading on the history of destroyed and depopulated villages across all of Palestine.

Perla Issa is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, Lebanon.

November 1, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

How (not) to Relativize the Holocaust

By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory | November 1, 2023

OK, I owe everyone an apology. I get it now. I’ve seen the light. I finally understand the true nature of my thoughtcrimes, and I take responsibility for them, and I stand ready to pay my debt to society.

I have to thank the State of Israel for bringing about this sudden epiphany. How it happened was, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and his delegation wore yellow Stars of David, i.e., the ones the Nazis forced the Jews to wear in public, at a Security Council session to make a statement. According to The Jerusalem Post, Ambassador Erdan then made remarks comparing the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the Holocaust.

“When Jewish babies were burned in Auschwitz, the world was silent, and today Jewish babies were burned in Be’eri and the towns of the South by the Nazi Hamas – and the world is silent again. I will make you remember the shame of your silence every time you look at me,” Arden said. “I will wear the yellow patch until the Nazi Hamas is eliminated and until the Security Council stops being silent and condemns the October 7 massacre. Some of you have learned nothing in the last eighty years! Some of you have forgotten why the United Nations was founded. So I will remind you. From today on, every time you look at me you will remember. When my grandfather and his children were sent to Auschwitz, the world was silent. When his wife and their seven children were sent to the gas chambers, the world was silent. When their bodies were burned alongside millions of other Jewish children, the world was silent,” Erdan said, comparing the silence of the UN about the Hamas massacre on October 7 to the silence of the international community regarding the horrors of the Holocaust.

Now, I’ll be honest, the first thought that went through my head when I read that Jerusalem Post piece was, “Great! Here’s an Israeli diplomat doing exactly what I’m being prosecuted for doing, and no one’s going to prosecute him! All I need to do is bring this to the attention of the Berlin District Court, and they’ll dismiss my case!”

But then I had my epiphany.

Basically, my epiphany was, I realized the two things are completely different, i.e., Israel’s use of a Nazi symbol to make a political statement and me doing the same thing … well, almost the same thing. I’ve never actually relativized or minimized or trivialized or compared anything to the Holocaust, as Gilad Erdan did at the UN. Actually, I’ve advised against doing that. But that doesn’t let me off the hook for my thoughtcrimes! No, I did what I did, and I will have to answer for it in January at the District Court of Berlin!

For readers unfamiliar with my case, what I did was, I tweeted these two Tweets featuring the the cover art of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, which is banned in Germany, and referring to the medical-looking masks that everyone was forced to wear during 2020-2022 as “ideological conformity symbols.”

You can read the background on my case here, or here, or here, or listen to me talk about it here, or here, or here, so I won’t go on about it here.

The important thing is, I understand now how totally wrong (and criminal) it was to do that, and how what I did is completely different from what UN Ambassador Erdan just did!

For starters, it wasn’t just those two Tweets. No, on Twitter, Facebook, and in my essays, and interviews, and, basically, every chance I got, for two years, I compared the rise of the “New Normal” to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I noted the similarities between these two forms of totalitarianism: the declaration of a “state of emergency” as a pretext to justify the cancellation of constitutional rights and rule by decree; the propaganda; the censorship; the criminalization of dissent; the mandatory displays of ideological conformity; the invasion of bodily autonomy; the segregation, demonization, and persecution of a scapegoat underclass; and so on … all the classic hallmarks of totalitarian systems.

I understand now how wrong (and criminal) that was.

Watching the Israelis whip out their yellow Stars of David at the Security Council clarified for me when it is and isn’t appropriate to compare things to the Nazis.

Check me, but I think I’ve got it straight now.

When governments and non-governmental entities roll out a “New Normal” on account of a completely fictional “apocalyptic pandemic,” lock people down in their homes for months, terrorize them with official propaganda, force everybody to wear medical-looking masks to display their conformity to the new official “reality” and create the appearance of a deadly plague, outlaw political protests, censor dissent, segregate and demonize anyone refusing to conform to the new official ideology, and otherwise transform societies into pathologized de facto police states, those governments and global non-governmental entities are absolutely nothing like the Nazis.

On the other hand, Hamas, the Islamist political and military organization that governs the Gaza Strip, is definitely exactly like the Nazis … except that there are only around 25,000 of them, and their “Reich” is a tiny stretch of land that has been totally blockaded by Israel for years, and is completely surrounded by an “Israel-Gaza barrier,” and has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. But, otherwise, Hamas is exactly like the Nazis!

See, the thing I didn’t quite understand when I tweeted my thoughtcrimes in 2022 was that being “exactly like the Nazis” has nothing to do with the actual history of Nazi Germany or totalitarianism per se. I was operating under the assumption that it did. That’s no excuse. I should have known better. Obviously, no one should ever be allowed to compare the rise of Nazism in Germany to any other totalitarian system or movement, no matter how blatantly similar it may be. In fact, the history of the rise of Nazism in Germany is irrelevant to, well, basically everything, unless your discussion is strictly limited to the Holocaust, or if you’re relativizing the Holocaust in defense of Israel’s right to defend itself … in which case, sure, break out those yellow stars and go nuts with the Holocaust comparisons.

Seriously, check my reasoning on this, because I don’t want to get it wrong again and end up facing yet another prosecution. Based on my new post-epiphany understanding, questioning the details of the official account of the October 7 attack is “Holocaust denial.” Hundreds of thousands of people peacefully demonstrating in support of Palestinians is a “hate march.” “Hamas Holocaust denial is dragging us into a new Dark Age.” The October 7 massacre was “barbarism as consequential as the Holocaust,” or at least as barbaric as the Babyn Yar massacre!

How am I doing? Am I good so far? I haven’t relativized the Holocaust, have I?

OK, one more test, just to make sure I’ve got my mind right around this stuff. If I, or anyone, were to compare what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza to, I don’t know, let’s say, just hypothetically, the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, that would be completely inappropriate, and anti-Semitic, and a hate crime, right? I mean, the IDF isn’t liquidating the strip. They’re defending Israel against Hamas, and are doing their best to protect civilians as they bomb whole neighborhoods into heaps of rubble, wiping out thousands of men, women, and children, entire extended families, who are trapped inside the “Israel-Gaza barrier,” and have nowhere to run or hide from the slaughter.

If anyone were to make that comparison, that would definitely be relativizing the Holocaust, right? That would be like calling for “the extermination of the Jews,” or literally dressing up like Hitler and walking around barking Nazi slogans in public. In fact, anyone comparing the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto, or to any other enclave of any other Nazi-occupied territory, is relativizing, minimizing, and trivializing the Holocaust, and should be fired from their job, blacklisted, and publicly condemned as “a Hamas-loving anti-Semite.”

Help me out. Am I getting the hang of this?

I hope so. All I can do at this point is apologize for leading people astray with all that stuff I wrote about “The New Normal Reich” and “pathologized totalitarianism” during 2020-2022. That, and try to make amends by humiliating myself on social media …

… which seems to be going pretty well so far.

Anyway, I am terribly sorry. No more “Holocaust relativizing” for me! I have seen how it is wrong, and terribly wrong, to compare anything to Nazi Germany, ever. I have learned my lesson. I’m cured! Praise god!

November 1, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 3 Comments